TO ALL THE GIRLS I'VE LOVED BEFORE

To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before

I feel like my generation is the guardian at the gate of a now long lost kind of chest swelling, hand-holding, heart pumping romantic love that came with a built-in Brill Building soundtrack that in the day featured songs written mostly by my people, as were most of the songs written for the stage and screen.  Carole King, Neil Diamond, Neal Sedaka, Barry Mann, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein were all from my tribe and it’s quite possible that I felt the yearning subtext of their lyrics and melodies on an even deeper level. 

Being Jewish in those days was not always easy and the music was our secret code which could be deciphered with the greatest of ease by our lonely trapeze swinging hearts.  

When I was a kid, growing up in the fifties, we men in training, doused ourselves with a tsunami of Vitalis and all the love songs that soared like lovebirds from the tiny speakers of our transistor radios were all about innocent lust.  There was April Love. Love Me, Tender love. To know, know, know him, was to love, love, love him.  We wondered why fools fell in love.  And god knows we loved Peggy Sue.

We dreamt about a first kiss, of holding hands and walking along the sand.

The early sixties took us to the Chapel of Love and Sinatra, who had pretty much been our in-house winged messenger of love from the forties on and was at the peak of his seductive Capital powers, Broadway was chock full of swoony songs (most written in the Jewish key of Angst) and all the family sitcoms on TV featured impossibly attractive teenagers who were spectacularly clumsy when it came to finding true love.

Love was the brass ring that we whirled past on the carousel of unobtainable girls, which we usually dismounted from, dizzy and disappointed.

When Playboy suddenly appeared, seeing those sly, smiling girl-next-door centerfolds, for the very first time, created in us, a kind of boy meets grail holy communion that made us worship at the bare feet of airbrushed flesh. Having never seen naked white breasts before, unfolding those pages was like getting the best present ever from God.   I don’t think I breathed for the entire hour or so that I stared at them.  My eyes were Margaret Keane big.  I remember smelling the paper and for years to come, I thought the scent of a woman was freshly published ink.  

This was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.  I memorized the names of every Playmate, talked to them, even the Swedish ones and they were all fantastic listeners.  I combed over their details.  Being over 21, to me these were all formidable WOMEN, who had in their often strategically placed hands, all the answers to the universe.  They were the future, the life goal, the reason to live.  I remember wondering what it must be like for them to always be naked.  Did they ever get dressed?  Did they have some kind of an allergy or natural aversion to cotton and wool?

The thing is, yes, of course, it was insanely sexual, but they were also deities to me.  They seemed kind. Non-threatening.  Open to seduction if they were treated well and with great respect.  They did not, for one single second, feel like “objects” to me because they seemed very much in charge of their choices. They were older, wiser and nude in such a relaxed manner, that all I wanted to do was figure out what made them so content.  

That helped me inform me how to pursue women to this day.

I have loved a lot of girls in my life. 

 I had crushes starting in the first grade.  And girls liked me too.  I remember a little black girl named Adele Calendar shimmying shyly, hula style, past my desk, depositing a small bag of change and walking away.  To this day I have no idea why she made that particular, reverse ATM deposit.   Did she think that the way to a Jew’s heart was to un-Shylock it?   In some ways, it was like a Mafia guy giving me his weekly take with respect.

By sixth grade I was in love with Barbie Braun and then even more so, with the pouted lipped Ellen Frost who I went to the World’s Fair with,  kissed during the It’s A Small World After All ride which ended with me giving her my Speidel I.D. Bracelet which had my name written in way too girly cursive.

Junior High School brought me first Karen Panitz, whose breast my hand accidentally rested on during a synchronized nap aboard a field trip bus, to the delight of everyone watching, which was everyone.

After that came my first real grown-up love, Denise Goodson, who had spectacular tight sweater breasts, white lipstick, go-go hair and boots and mini skirts. We spent most of our private time heavy petting, which in the day, was deeply rewarding.  It literally had a zen life effect on me.  I genuinely adored her and her parents.  I was the nice boy who moms loved and they welcomed me so warmly that it felt like they were giving me all-access permission to grope their daughters.

In camp, I lost my virginity to Marci Greenberg.  When Marci and I were ten or so, we went roller skating, we fell backwards and my flailing skate knocked out her two front teeth.  We fell in love at 17, and all I remember during my first moment was thinking, ‘Hmmm. This feels familiar.  Did I did this before?”  Marci had green lantern eyes and Farrah Fawcett hair and what I remember most was that all I could think of was her. 24 hours a day.  I had no other thoughts.  No other ambitions but to climb Mt. Marci.  We dated again in our early twenties which in hindsight, is incredibly sweet, don’t you think?  We were young lovers in the seventies, in New York, fueled by the need to do everything together.  

Then came Carol.  Oh, Carol.  I went to visit my friend Susan’s house and Carol, wearing only a work shirt,  post-shower dripping wet, answered the door and all I could hear was, “I am Tondalaya.”

 I just didn’t fall in love.  I orbited into it.  That night we watched The Cerebral Palsy telethon and I remember thinking that the song for our first dance at our wedding would be, “Look at us we’re walking,” hopefully sung by Jane Pickens or Dennis James.   

When college kidnapped Carol and sent her away first to GW in D.C. and then to B.U. in Boston,  it was the single most devastating, torturous times of my life.  It was like being imprisoned in a kind of Gulag where love was replaced by cruel arctic winds and the plaintive howling of love-struck wolves.   

We saw each other as much as possible and those trips to Washington and Massachusetts were lusty and wonderful.  But we were not to last.  I screwed that up, beginning when I told her that I had slept with someone.  I know now, that her being so perfect, so not neurotic, so easy and fun, was threatening to me. I had been raised by a mom who was Mrs. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde who had two very distinct, very different personalities.  One was beautiful, witty, funny and amazing.  Like Carol.   The other was insane, angry, given to fits of rage and unimaginably cruel with a propensity towards belt whipping punishment.  So love confused me.  I literally did not know love without rage.  So the kind of love that Carol offered was not to be trusted, because I secretly yearned for the sudden slap in the face and the severe corporal limits that my mother imposed on me.  

It took me decades to get over Carol and decades to figure it all out.  My first marriage was a form of experimentally ill theater with a wife whose anger erupted like Vesuvius with little time to escape.   It was intermittently dazzling and threatening.  

I cheated.  A lot.  Whenever love tried to possess me, it felt like Houdini’s straitjacket and the only way to wiggle out of the panic was to turn to another woman.

Ms. X was a particularly deep and deeply involving affair.  I met her when I was married and despite falling insanely in love with her, there was little that I could do, given the reality that I had two kids.  Then, when I was finally free, I met her again and she was married.  We kept finding ways to be together in seductive secrecy, but we were like two clocks operating in two very different time zones.   She was briefly pregnant (I was thrilled) but lost it and that was the beginning of the end.  One day our mainsprings simply gave out and we went our separate ways.  That was really hard because she was the first woman who seemed to get me as much as I got her.  We were thrilled by each other.  Admired each other.  Try to say goodbye to that.

Then came Leslie, who became both my writing and bed partner who, on paper, was the quantum opposite of my wife who turned out, in the end, to be exactly like my mom, we’re talking a doppelgänger, which again, both delighted and infuriated me.  Her favorite author was Stephen King and I could easily have gone by the name “Mr. Man.”  Misery loves company and sadly, way too often, me.  (Editor’s note: I am, because of space restraints, doing sweeping generalizations.   My relationship with Leslie for example yielded some wonderful crops.  As in life, I am rushing to judgment to make as much sense of my life and reach as many imperative conclusions as I can because the rest of my life is acting like my leaning on the horn IMPATIENT father in the driveway. 

My last love, Mary Ellen, who came with a hundred assorted flavors, was much smarter than me in places where I was profoundly deaf and/or profoundly inexperienced.  She literally took me by the hand, just like the girls of the fifties once did and led me out into the world for some of the best adventures of my life. We did the bucket list cross-country drive, through the south, and over the course of thousands of miles, we never had so much as a minor disagreement.  We traveled with her mini golden doodle Stella, (who she would call by saying, “come come”).  We sang for infinite miles, listened to audiobooks, drove through storms, disagreed about minor things and most of all deeply respected each other.  She is an accomplished artist: a paint/sculptor/photographer and we visited one of the sculptures on the campus of Vanderbilt University.  We heard authentic bluegrass in Nashville.   Ambled through Graceland (where Stella left a deposit right near Elvis’s grave).

It took me months to get over Mary Ellen and in some ways, it is astonishing that I can still, at my age, still experience heartache.  In some ways it makes me feel younger and capable.   Like the factory is still up and running, ready to restore a broken heart and maybe even make it beat a little faster.

There have been others who I have loved more briefly. Sandi from Stuyvesant Town.  All the camp girlfriends.   I dated an insane woman who suffered from borderline personality disorder who ushered me into that ride filled amusement park called Depression where acute anxiety is distributed like cotton candy.

I have had mad imaginary crushes on movie stars, some whom lived decades before like Paulette Goddard. Carol Lombard.  Sophia Loren.

The truth is, all of these girls and women are still very much alive inside me.  I can, on demand, call up their scents, their velvet skin, their young bodies, their older bodies, the love that they all had for me.  They sit in my gut, like a Greek Chorus, still caring, still forewarning, still caring.

Past love and its dimwitted bff Forever Lust, are an integral part of the fabric of who I am.  It is what makes me passionate to this day which explains why most guys don’t simply like things.  

We guys LOVE our baseball teams. We LOVE our cars and we LOVE our Sonos speakers and hamburgers.  

If we can’t be with the one we love, then we will love the side of fries that we’re with.

Every single relationship that I have ever had has been an education.  An indelible life lesson.   Every single misfire, every single mistake, every single and not so single Miss and Mrs that I have been with have taught me something that has made me a better man.

There are regrets.  And there is longing. That is what propels me back, aboard the next time travel daydream towards the recreation of all the perfect moments that I miss.  

Kissing Carol goodnight for hours on the floor of her front foyer at 2 in the morning.  Seducing Miss X in the after hours of our office, taking off her shirt for the first and seeing the Promised land.  Stroking Mary Ellen”s hand and arm while she drove as the invisible sails of our Nissan unfurled and the wind guided us towards the next spontaneous adventure.