Chapter Thirty Two
My life was beginning to work. I was on my way to greatness and fame. Now all I needed was Love to round out the equation.
There were a few women in my life in Austin. Most of them were fairly close.
Terry and her friend Stephanie did volunteer crew work at Zach Scott and we three dated over the years.
Terry was a tiny little woman, 5 feet tall, with a taut perfect body in proportion to her size. She was gregarious and funny and adventuresome.
She told me she was living with, though separate from, her ex-husband, whom I never met. She had three children with him and appeared to me to be a perfect mom and, I learned, an even more perfect lover. Terry liked to "have a good time" as she euphemized sex.
Stephanie was of middle-eastern heritage and upper-class breeding. She was a sophisticated woman whose dedication to Eleanor Roosevelt was matched only by her sexual proclivity.
The two were close friends and when I entered the equation it began with Terry at a cast party one night. She was wearing a form fitting cashmere jumpsuit that attracted men's eyes like a flame its moths.
But Terry this night had eyes and other appurtenances only for me. I walked her to her car and the romance was on.
During the next few weeks she kept mentioning her friend Stephanie and how attracted to me she was and one day she said Stephanie wanted to ask me over for dinner but was too shy to do so.
I had her convey that I'd love to have dinner and the next day Stephanie called to invite me. That night we dined on the delicacies of love.
She had baked a fancy chicken cacciatore with wine sauce and asparagus spears, but it had to wait until after the entrée had been consumed.
There was electricity in the air when I arrived at her condo. She had a look about her I’d never seen at the theatre. She was not a crew person tonight: she was Woman.
We had a glass or two of wine with our small talk. Our eyes kept their own conversation going until I couldn't take any more.
We made our way to the dinner table; and, while she was fondling the rolls into the basket I began fondling her hips beneath her free flowing silk skirt.
We moved upstairs to her bed and spent the next few hours in each others arms discovering the pleasures that await those who seek.
Later, the rolls had cooled and the chicken and asparagus had dried just the slightest bit, but it was still a memorable feast.
Something changed in Stephanie after our first time together. Then, she had shown just a hint of passivity in her lovemaking, a hesitancy in her enthusiasm, as if it were foreign to her.
She was free with her gifts but her attitude, in retrospect, required she wasn't allowed to enjoy the passion as thoroughly as she wanted to.
Whether it was her upbringing or her personality I couldn't tell at the time; but I found her to be more and more passive, though amenable, on future evenings.
Terry and Stephanie discussed me amongst themselves and I discussed each with the other. There were no secrets between the three of us.
I asked for guidance and insight into Stephanie’s hesitance from Terry but she couldn't help me.
I asked for it from Stephanie and she didn't seem to be able to comprehend what I was talking about. She made love the way she made love and that's the way she made love she informed.
She didn't understand that it bothered me, and lessened my pleasure, to feel like I was simply using her to masturbate myself; that her simply lying there was not what she had done on our first encounter.
It was the way she was, she told me: she enjoyed the sex intellectually but she didn't move much. It was as simple as that so I should accept it.
Terry, on the other hand, was a participant of the highest order. She and I had many "good times" over the years.
She did have one little peccadillo, however, that I found amusing. She liked to get together the night before my openings.
She would make love all night on those occasions. She liked, for some reason I never learned or deduced, to keep me awake as long as she could.
If she had a Delilah complex I don't know, but I always felt thoroughly drained just before I went on stage on opening nights.
I always slept later than usual the morning of the first show and the natural adrenaline rush an actor feels when he first steps on stage always brought me to performance level instantaneously.
But she liked to wear me out the night before.
Lesson: Good sex relieves opening night “jitters”.
In 1982, the night before my national TV debut on "Dallas" was to air, Terry called me from Oklahoma (where she had moved) and asked if she could come down to watch the show with me and “We could have a good time!”
I hated telling her I was in a very monogamous relationship at the time and that a group of us was going to be at my new girlfriend's house when it aired. And the night before the show went on was not possible, either.
We lost track of one another after that. I missed her friendship. We could be just as entertained without being in the sack.
Conan’s pizza restaurant on Guadalupe (in Austin, it's pronounced locally as Gwa-da-loop), the main drag along the western edge of the University of Texas campus, has a raised dining area where you can sit and eat and watch the passing parade of students and others.
One Saturday afternoon I was watching the "parade of virgins" as I liked to call them, when a young woman and her son took the table next to me.
We were the only customers in the area and it was very hard to ignore her.
She initially attracted me because the rapport she had with her son was outstanding. She spoke to him as an adult and he responded in his own way as an equal. He was 7.
I spoke with my daughters the same way, as if they were small intelligent adults.
I remarked what a smart son she had there. She thanked me and we struck up a conversation like we'd known each other for ages.
I talked about my daughters in Amarillo. She said her parents lived in the Lubbock vicinity, 105 miles to the south.
I told her I was an actor doing a show about mummies at the Melodrama Theatre and offered her comps for the matinee the next day, Sunday.
Rosie and her son Ryan showed up and hissed and booed and screamed with delight at my mock scariness, all the while pelting me with popcorn.
When I made my first entrance that day the entire audience stood and sang “Happy Mummy’s Day to You!”
It was Mother’s Day!
After the show I gave her my address and phone number and invited her to come over any time. I warned her it was clothing optional and advised she would not have to remove her clothes if she didn't want to. She said it didn't bother her at all and said she’d come visit.
The first time she did she had the imprint of a shoe on her t-shirt between her breasts. She was crying and clung to me shaking and sobbing.
She lived with a man who beat her when he got angry. She was in the process of getting him to move out of her trailer but he wasn't going quietly.
I offered any assistance she wanted: police, battered women's shelter, she could stay with me, whatever she needed.
She told me the situation would work itself out...and eventually it did. She got rid of him in a few months and he never came back.
Our friendship was more supportive than physical and she and her son became regular fans. They came to just about every show I did over the next few years.
We’ve maintained the friendship over the years. I visited Austin a couple of times to do voice work for old clients there and whenever I found myself in the neighborhood we'd have a bite to eat together.
We still correspond at Christmastime. Our notes are brief but there's one New Year's Day we both hold dear to our hearts.
Her son is now practicing law.
Cindy Holly and Carole Collins-Baer were Melodrama regulars. They'd come to the shows together and we’d flirt. I waited on them one night and struck up a long lasting friendship with Carole.
But Cindy and I started dating and seeing each other regularly. Carole became a friend first and a lover later.
The time frame is early ‘80's. AIDS had just been discovered but no one talked about it because no one knew its deadly potential, yet. Most ignored it if they even knew of its existence. Frankly, I don't remember hearing about it till, maybe, ‘82.
The big worry of the day was the same as always: the clap and “non¬specific urethritis”, which finally got its own name: Chlamydia. No one practiced safe sex. There was no such phrase in the vernacular.
Although the rampant-free love era was coming to a close, sexual freedom had become an integral part of America's sexuality; however, its celebrants were maturing into more committed relationships and practices. It was not uncommon to play the field, but the practices of wanton swinging and "open marriages" were dropping off in more and more relationships.
Cindy was "ready" anytime, anyplace, anywhere. She loved to "tryst", as she called it, at lunchtime.
She liked to go back to work with a little bit of semen leaking out of her and delighted in calling to tell me of, perhaps, a drop that landed on her shoe that she "neglected" to wipe off, relishing the fact that only she knew what it was and where -and who- it had come from.
Or she'd tell me of a trickle she'd feel slowly making its way down her thigh as she stood in her boss' office after an encounter.
She never said so, but I know she was hoping it would ooze below her short hemline and be noticed by her boss as she left his office.
Cindy, too, became a good friend and lover. The two attributes combined almost perfectly in her.
She was the last friend I saw the night before I moved from Austin to New York in my attempt at finally cracking the Big Apple.
She had been living with a man for a few months and before she came over she screwed him and then asked me to masturbate for her while she displayed herself and his semen to me.
I tried, but I didn't achieve the orgasm she wanted. I had wanted to make love to her this one last time and I think her actions were a protest against my leaving.
Cindy had been dating the two of us simultaneously since I knew her. She used to tell me there was only one man whose penis fit her vagina exactly.
It was not until I reached New York that I even considered it had been mine.
Lesson: If a woman tells you a secret involving another man, it’s about you!
I'd made a big mistake in leaving her; but, in keeping with my lifelong habit of taking “no” for an answer, I had been respectful of what I thought her directions were taking.
It was a bittersweet parting...made all the more so in my memory when I learned from Carole she had gotten into some fairly dysfunctional and abusive relationships after returning to her hometown of Abilene, Texas and had unsuccessfully attempted suicide
Carole suffered a stroke in the late ‘90s and passed away in the new century.
I met Nancy Gosshorn the night Mummy, Bloody Mummy opened at Melodrama. Several of us from the cast went to JoJo's, a coffee shop that served alcohol, for drinks and munchies after the show where Nancy and her ex-husband joined our group. She was friends with two of our number.
It was clear she was a free agent and that the relationship with her husband was over with because she was flirting with me shamelessly.
I was moving out of the nude apartments that night and Nancy indicated she'd like to help me move...that night. I told her I just had to pick up a few bed linens because I was spending my first night in the new place.
After my being there about a year the dynamics at the nude island of sanctuary were changing.
Several biker types had moved in and were dealing speed from their apartment.
All sorts of unsavories were coming and going and spending way too much time ogling and whistling at the women.
Another newcomer to the place had been caught prostituting a fourteen year old girl out his apartment. No one knew if she was his daughter or not but the police were alerted and he was told his company was no longer appreciated and that if he left before they arrived they'd not say anything about it.
The management's Libertarian philosophy was a little too live-and-let-live for my taste and I told them so.
Later I was told the police knew who the man was and had arrested him the night he left the complex.
I still didn’t like their laissez faire attitude in the situation.
In a 10 day period 28 units were vacated by disgruntled and worried tenants. I was one of them.
So Nancy followed me when we left JoJo's and helped me move a few things. She was disappointed not seeing any naked bodies but it was late and nudists, like other people, sleep.
After helping me make the bed she helped me mess it up again. She left during the wee hours without leaving a number or any way to reach her. I knew I could reach her through Tim and Becky -our mutual friends in the cast-, but I had hoped it would have been a little more personal than that.
I was awakened the next morning by a loud pounding on my door.
When one left the confines of the New Manor apartments there was a sign on all of the gates reminding in bold letters: "Remember! You MUST wear clothes outside these gates!"
The habit of almost a year of answering my apartment door naked hadn't changed over night; and, bleary eyed, I flung open my door, realizing instantly I was no longer where my sleepy head thought I was.
Standing outside was Nancy. She acknowledged my greeting with a smile and pushed past me saying, "I came by to see if you were as neat when I was sober as when I was drunk!"
"Want some coffee?" was about all I could muster.
"No. Get dressed and I'll buy you breakfast."
Nancy was 5'6", medium length brown hair going prematurely grey, dark eyes, and a slim upper body with broad hips and sensuous thighs. Her breasts were exquisitely shaped bells that sagged enough to assert her womanliness and tilted up enough to confirm her youth.
And she was a sad-sack. She almost always seemed depressed. It was a state of being that never varied. She'd laugh and enjoy herself but she had this undercurrent of melancholy that permeated her soul.
We talked about it from time to time and I'd try to "psyche" out a reason for it.
She had been ignored by her parents. They tended to show affection to, and spend time more with, her older sister. Her father was an accomplished carpenter and woodworker and built much of the furniture that his daughters owned...only to Nancy he had given the "mistakes", the "seconds”.
When I saw her furniture it looked marvelous, the craftsmanship was of the highest order, but she pointed out slight imperfections here and there that only a professional would notice, or even care about.
Though, to her it was an obvious affront.
She didn't moan and groan and say "woe is me" all the time. She just seemed sad. And "seemed" is the crucial word here.
If you asked her how she was she'd answer she was fine...but you'd feel the "sadness" going on deep inside.
Low self esteem would be the current pop-psych evaluation of her temperament. Maybe, or maybe she was just sad like some people are always "up" and happy-go-lucky.
Whatever she was I found her intriguing and friendly and lovely and enjoyed being in her company. Too, she was a good listener.
She had good relationships with both her former husbands and she'd fantasize to me about having the three of us ganging up on/with/to/at and around her.
I've only had fantasies about three-somes before but there were never any other males around in them.
We never fulfilled either of those fantasies with each other.
It was becoming a curse in my relationships lately: we never broke up, we just moved away. Nancy and I lost track when she moved out of town; but then bumped into one another briefly, in Dallas, a few years later. She was waitressing in a place I stopped to kill a few minutes before an audition for some film I didn't get.
She was working at a JoJo’s!
Lesson: What goes around comes around.
She'd gotten married to a man with 6 kids and was about to move to Georgia. She said she was ecstatically happy. I couldn't tell.
With Nancy, you never could.
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