REMINISCENCES OF 1970s SAN FRANCISCO
Curt — The Man I Met Naked on the Quaking Ground and Came to Love
In mid-night, the walls moved, and the bay window shook. Earthquake!
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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 waterbed in my bedroom’s big bay window at the back of the second-story flat in the three-story Victorian 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 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. Robert, Jan, and Dennis were already heading down the front stairs. About to turn and follow them, Joe 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 in front of a guy, also sitting on the quaking ground. Face to face, we looked at each other for a moment. With our knees nearly touching, our hearts raced as fast as the ground shook. Our eyes each traveled down each other’s torso. We were both naked. It was clear from his face that he liked what he saw. I winked. He blushed and stirred. I grinned 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. Rising, we made our way to the second floor, through the sliding door, into my bedroom, and onto the waterbed. We spoke no words, but acted in unison, each knowing what the other intended, each acquiescing to the other’s urgings.
From naked strangers on the lawn to nude friends on the waterbed in 65 seconds, I thought, “must be some kind of record.
Foreplay occupied the next couple of hours. We rolled and pitched about. The warmth of the heated water suffused our skin. We periodically lay still, wrapped in each other’s arms.
At one point, I was lying on my stomach. He was on his back next to me. Rolling over onto me, he sat up and began massaging my shoulders and upper back. He was good at it, almost professional. For the moment, no sexual element intruded. He was intent on doing the job aptly. He learned my little reactions and knew where to rub or squeeze and how hard. There was an innate nature to our relating.
After perhaps half an hour of that, he rolled me over and sat astride my groin. He smiled a wicked smile. 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, I knew that the time for professional massage was over. We began again.
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, I had the thought, Well, it mightn’t be 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 Curt. He called me Alex.
He lived with two roommates in the third-floor flat. After a month, we decided we were lovers. Though he didn’t move out of his flat, he spent most of his free time and all his nights with me.
Sizable where it counted, he was larger than me, which was unusual. Well defined, he was nicely muscled but not overly developed. He was shorter than me but tall enough, and compact. He had thick hair the color of midnight and dark brows above hazel eyes that melted my soul down to the place where it longed to be. His tanned body was hairless but for a thin treasure trail that led from his sternum down his hard abs 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.
There was an empathic nature to our love-making. He was a bottom. I was versatile. I taught him to top. After that, we would switch roles willy-nilly. We fit more smoothly together than Yin did with Yang. I intuited his wants. He knew my needs as if he had taken a degree in them. His wants and my needs magically melded.
Sexual energy flowed through us like an inexhaustible river on a long course to the sea, raging over falls sometimes, sometimes in deep pools lolling calmly. Mornings, late afternoons, and evenings, and even some lazy weekend middays, we enjoyed the waterbed like toddler twins splashing at bath time. We’d have put down roots, but that they would have punctured the mattress and spoiled the fun.
I lived with Joe and his boyfriend Dennis, who had the front bedroom looking onto Noe St. There were also Robert and his girlfriend Jan, 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 backyard.
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 individual-studies credits 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.
Joe and Robert were friends and students at another law school. Dennis was getting his Master’s Degree in Special Education. Jan was studying to be a physician assistant. Curt was in an architectural school, spending a year as an intern at a prestigious architecture firm in the Business District.
Joe 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 we all would be out. Curt cooked on Sundays. He wasn’t 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 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, at last, I thought it safe, I undressed him and put him on the waterbed, 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.
At 29, I did not do drugs. My only drug use was marijuana during my first year in law school two years earlier. I tried it twice to be sociable, but it put me out of touch with time. I didn’t like that. Although I had many opportunities to experiment with the full panoply of other drugs, I never did, not so much from morals or conviction as from disinterest.
Curt was 20 and well acquainted with drugs. The night before proved that.
I told him I never wanted to be so afraid again. I told him there would be no more drugs, or there would be no more me. He agreed. There would be no more drugs. It did not surprise me he kept his word. He was the epitome of the impetuous young, but a man of honor and integrity nonetheless. I admired him for that. I was also thankful 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 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 that mirrored my own. 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 Marin 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, devotion, and intent, not a net around the genitalia. And not because Curt asked or expected it of me. 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 Curt seemed not to mind giving it up. The pandemonium made socializing a chore rather than a pleasure. The bars were dead until after 11. By 11, we wanted to be home; we had a waterbed to subdue.
We had friends, of course, many of them couples. We were special 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 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. Joe and Robert took the other.
I made several friends there, men and women. One had moved to the Bay Area from Boston. He had been a Boston lawyer for five years. This was his third time taking the course, having failed the exam twice prior. That was one indicator 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 discussing news of the day or literature or music — anything but law. Often, Curt joined us. I introduced him as my lover. Two of the women were a lesbian couple. The others were straight but at ease with us, as were the straight men.
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. Curt 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. Curt 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. Curt 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. As it was, I felt guilty 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 its fixity. For a while, they indelibly brought my thread and Curt’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
