Boys of Summer (2006, 2022)

Some of Life (Reprise)

Since confirming our impending move to the Midwestern college town of Athens, Ohio, I’ve been joking that it sounds like Iowa City II, a re-imagining of the quietly iconic literary-spot where I spent my undergraduate years. But as those of us in MY PHD COHORT (I won’t be obnoxious about this forever, but I will be for a few months) introduce ourselves in lengthening email threads between panics about housing, I find myself suddenly wrestling — or maybe more like playing with — flashbacks to a vivid degree I was not prepared for. When someone mentioned the “cozy/hippie/punk/alternative scene,” I was suddenly 22 again, buzzing with a wild newfound confidence that would’ve gotten me in trouble in this age of spontaneous and constant video-documentation but at that time, could just be Being Young and feeling hot, making mistakes, yes, but nothing that caused the kind of lasting damage usually reserved for older adults to incur.

What I didn’t know about the summer of 2006 is that my father would die at the end of it, in his sleep and without warning. This cataclysmic personal tragedy became a retroactive reason for many of my friends to forgive my behavior, as though I had been reacting to something I couldn’t have predicted. What that mostly goes back to is that at that time, I was in the third year of a live-in monogamous romantic relationship and — after the first-ever severe bout with depression I had ever experienced — I came roaring back to life with a hunger for connection that wasn’t the kind of connection I had with the person I lived with. I would come to understand, later, that the room I was given to explore as I did was an act of monumental generosity, but at that time, I made up for a 22-year-long inferiority complex with confidence to the point of being full of myself. I made demands, they were complied with, and I wouldn’t think much of it for years.

I met C at Iowa City Pride, one of the most genuine and defiantly un-corporate Pride events in America. He was a friend of a friend’s. He was beautiful, but quiet. I was at my loudest, which was saying something, and, with a history of rejection from brooding artsy guys, I didn’t expect to draw the attention of this one. After the parade, I followed my friend and our steadily-growing crowd of comrades home and we all crammed into her airy living room. I don’t remember what compelled me to go into full oration mode was we all sat sprawled on various parts of her well-worn couch, her white carpeted floor. But I assumed his scribbling into a small notebook was part of his own world, until, in response to whatever I was uninhibitedly pontificating about, my friend said, “Someone should be writing this down,” and C looked up from his notebook and replied, “I have been.”

You probably don’t need dark emo hair and hypnotic color-changing eyes for that move to work, but it certainly won’t hurt, especially not in 2006. I had marched in Iowa City Pride in my bra that day and had no qualms about staying on the couch that way, drawing flowers and other designs on my body in black ink, as was my inexplicable but dedicated wont any time I felt inspired conversation going all around me. And the conversation was inspired — whatever attention I courted, I wasn’t the only one talking. Eventually, though, in true Summer Romance fashion, everyone else seemed to fade and the conversation was between C and me, ready to follow our mutual friend to work at the coffeehouse where I had met her. When the conversation shifted from the living room couch to the coffeehouse-couch, I put a shirt on, but I didn’t stop drawing on my body.

Our conversation lasted until the coffeehouse closed, but we weren’t done. We decided to go to the Deadwood, which, at that time, was the bar for Iowa City’s English majors. Months before, I had stomped to that bar in anger over a dramatic falling-out with a Paleontology graduate student who had a penchant for theater chicks but an equally devoted penchant to breaking things off after a certain pitch, secure, I told him later, in proving to himself that he’s “stable, not just boring.” In my rage, I ordered drinks, but they were cocktails and I practically spat them out. “THESE GIRLY DRINKS AREN’T DOING IT FOR ME,” I proclaimed to my bartender friend. “Get me a shot of tequila.”

“If you’re doing a shot, that’s on me,” he said obligingly, and there’s probably symbolic significance in my having learned the salt-lick-lime ritual from one of Iowa’s whitest whiteboys, but that shot and the ensuing ecstasy became a whole-ass made up cosmology. I believed, wholeheartedly, that tequila was the essence of the Sun God, even though I never specified which religion’s Sun God, and that there was something transcendent about doing shots, which was why it mattered who you did them with, and of course I expounded upon all this with C, because I expounded upon everything with him. He was a mesmerized and mesmerizing listener.

I didn’t feel like I needed tequila that night, though, I was hopped up already. I said as much, “I don’t feel like I need to do a shot right now,” and he said, “Well let me know when you do, because I’m buying.”

And so we did, and by that time it was something like 1:30 in the morning. I didn’t have a cellphone and wouldn’t get one until iPhones were (for better? worse? both?) on the market years later. My then-partner was at home, and as a dedicated introvert, was used to my gallivanting. But I had never been out late with someone I was this powerfully attracted to before, and even as cocky as I was then, I had never expected to ignite that kind of attraction mutually.

Still, we left the bar at closing time — 2am — and didn’t part ways. We walked to College Green park, laid next to each other on the grass in a way that might have been innocent enough maybe, then it started raining. We didn’t assume we needed to find shelter, since we loved the feel of soft rain on our faces, but then it started pouring, and we had to race into the gazebo for some Sound of Music-type-shit.

By 3:30 or so I figured it was really time to get home. The rain had stopped and I had no excuse. “Can I kiss you goodnight?” C asked.

I said something non-committal like, “You really shouldn’t,” then he decided to compromise with an almost-kiss that may or may not have been designed to show me how otherworldly-soft his lips were, and it was so late and the tequila still had me and I said something much more committal like, “Well, come on, that’s pointless,” then I came up with 2 arbitrary It’s Not Cheating If rules on the spot, which were:

1. No tongue

2. Anything that happens between the hours of 3 and 6am doesn’t really count.

A relatively chaste transgression, then, as transgressions go, but still the kind of thing you Confess the next day if you’ve violated the terms of your commitment, which I had. I did confess, and my then-partner took it quite well, perhaps taking more comfort in the role of the tequila than was strictly warranted (Yes I’m a 5’2 lightweight, but it was one shot!)

I was not forbidden from hanging out with C. I told him we shouldn’t cross that line ever again and we didn’t — not that one — but we kept drawing new ones. He lived in a co-op house a few blocks away from the University of Iowa campus and I was varying-degrees-of-acquaintances with a couple of his housemates, so it was natural for me to have dinner there, follow him back to his bedroom afterwards where our marathon conversations unfolded again. The first time I slept over was entirely by accident. We were talking under soft light, facing each other on the bed, upright, then we fell asleep at some point, and I was shocked to wake up in the sky-blue puffed-sleeved thriftstore dress I had been wearing all day, the birds singing.

Because of the neverending nature of our discussions, I decided to plan for a re-occurrence, and it still baffles me that I could call out, “I’m sleeping over at C’s tonight,” and head out with my toothbrush and a change of clothes in a little backpack to no objection. We did not keep our distance that night, but we didn’t kiss either. I spent a lot of time touching his back, he spent a lot of time touching my leg, and we never saw each other change out of our clothes. The next day at the communal breakfast table, no one actually said “Hell yeah C, score!” but they may as has well have — their smiles weren’t cryptic. I felt looked upon as C’s possession, and the sick or problematic or primal or crazy part is, I liked that.

We spent hours at the ecclesiastically-windowed Iowa City Public Library, we went to movies, we went out to lunch and/or dinner, and one night I talked him into renting both The Craft and The Crush, and we engaged in this double feature (that I still stand behind) in the wood-paneled basement of the co-op house. As we were saying our goodbyes, post-viewing, he said, “That dress is amazing, by the way.” Offering this compliment at the end of the night rather than the beginning gave the impression that he’d been staring at it all night (it was a blindingly orange sundress), and so my time at home was largely spent listening to ridiculously upbeat music about falling in love, and writing public blog posts on MySpace addressed to a “you” that any fool could identify. My partner started to get more human and less saintly about our relationship. “This guy thinks he’s your boyfriend,” was a claim I initially refused. “He’s calling every day like he’s your boyfriend.”

I insisted that anyone could call anyone every day if they cared that much. Then, one day, he had a new housemate. Her interests overlapped with a number of mine and her dyed red hair read like a challenge to my natural red hair. I still went over as usual for vegan cookies (made with bananas instead of eggs), but he’d gotten cold toward me, making me self-conscious about the flirtation that had come so naturally all summer. I finally asked him, later, if there was “something going on” between him and the new housemate, and of course there was. (By the time I left Iowa City, they were married.) I asked him in a MySpace message why he couldn’t have told me that rather than letting me go on the way I had and look desperate in front of her. “I balked a little, you know?” he offered by way of explanation. “By the way, you owe me $15.00.”

I did, from a dinner where we’d splurged, and in between his falling in unattached love and my dented heart, my father died. C didn’t call me when he found out, and that’s when I realized my partner was right: there was no need for him to call me, now that he had no reason to pretend to be my boyfriend.

I went to New Orleans for the funeral and paid my debt when I got back, sitting at our touchstone coffeehouse with the friends who had started it all. Later, a girl I met for the first time that night asked me how C and I knew each other and I stammered something. “He’s my ex,” she confided, “and I noticed him looking at you the way he used to look at me.”

By coincidence, she and I took a German Film class together the following semester and bonded over a greater variety of things than an ill-fated relationship with C. But she was the only person who asked me, “How long were you guys like…dating?” cautious with the word because were we dating, was that possible? But upon reflection, we were. If we hadn’t been, things wouldn’t have changed so drastically when he got a girlfriend for real.

—

Years later, a new friend would text me, “I think I saw you walking past the gym the other day, with your bf?” about the person who was decidedly not my aboveboard committed partner. I was a little less delusional this time, because this was the work of a year, not the work of a month, and the dynamic was incomparably richer and more multifaceted than what C and I were capable of in our early 20’s. For reasons of both wonder and despair that comes of living life for much longer.

Falling in love in San Francisco is more exciting than falling in love in Iowa City, you can do it with the Golden Gate bridge in the background, you can laugh like out-of-your-mind stoners in the Height even though you’re not high, you can make out with the Pacific’s waves roaring behind you. Most of my favorite haunts in Iowa City are gone now — Campus 3, the movie theater that provided the indie middle-ground between the Bijou’s art-house-itude and the Coralville Mall’s blockbusters — That’s Rentertainment, the video store in whose basement I once rode out a tornado topless — Thai Flavors, an unimaginably delirious Thai restaurant run by an elderly Thai couple whose saintliness was beyond what this world could hold, they gave 10% of their profits to a different local charity every week and offered an out-of-this-world lunch buffet for $4.95. Even before my favorite upscale restaurant, Atlas, closed, they took the strawberry shortcake — two actual biscuits covered with strawberry decadence — off the menu. No more day-drinking mojitos on that patio, the way I did in 2006.

Bless Iowa City’s dedication to used bookstores — those are still there. When I asked a college friend about the place after a recent visit he said it looked “half-totally-unrecognizable and half-exactly the same.”

I already see myself looking back on Athens 10 years from now and describing it in much the same way. I haven’t weathered a winter since 2016 when we were living in Boston. Do I still know how to defy a blizzard in knee-high snow boots and take warm-cuts through obliging businesses on the way home, stopping for 2-3 minutes in each spot as I get closer? Working out had not yet become my life in those years, so my bulked-up shoulders no longer fit my down trenchcoat. That coat has an asymmetrical zipper, unmistakably 2015. (Can I sell it as ‘vintage’ 10 years on?)

All this upending and remaking of life decisions is feeling Fountain of Youth-ish, in much the same way I once thought only falling in unexpected love could. It took me a long time to find my passion, and there’s no way I could’ve even discovered Rhetoric and Composition — specifically teaching it — without this detour into the-first-two-years-of-an-MFA-program.

Weird how life works, weird how love works, weird what comes back when we were not expecting it. I feel nervous and fluttery in a way that I didn’t when we first arrived in Milledgeville. When we got here, I didn’t feel done with California, and in some ineffable way I still don’t. I never bothered to jump through the tedious hoops necessary to get a Georgia disabled placard for the car, so we’ve been parking in Regular People spots the entire time we’ve been here. A few days ago, mail arrived from the California DMV, addressed to my current residence, no misdirection: it was a California disabled placard, to replace the one that had expired.

Ian still has family in California and lo these 13 years in, they’ve long felt like my family too. Should we decide to visit, we can fly there and rent a car, using this California placard with borrowed California plates. Something about that blue hard plastic felt inviting: “I know we’ve had our differences, Sarah, but California’s not done with you either.”

Yes, I’m looking for reassurances everywhere I can find them. I feel simultaneously more focused than I ever have and epically uncertain about what awaits. But I had my certainties about what MFA Existence would entail and I was wrong to levels of rage and despair I can’t wait to (humorously!) share with you when I’m no longer contracted to keep quiet. I had my certainties about what would happen to my relationship with Ian when I stopped keeping secrets in 2022. I had my certainties, of course, that if ever there was someone who coursed with life so fully and defiantly as to be immortal, it was my father, so I should’ve learned in 2006 that certainty is not a thing.

Still, there’s been far too much breakage in such a short time for me to not look out for what holds. Or, perhaps more honestly said: ever since Ian’s taught me just how deeply love can hold, I want more that stays.

Is that hypocritical of me to say when I’m the one who’s always moving?