The Jen Story
“They may say that our love was only half real, but that’s only half true.”
— Geese
My 1988 Journal
Among my untold tales is the Jen story. The events are covered by my 1988 journal. It’s a red sketchbook decorated with runes, with black plastic ring binding missing several rings. It was only a year but kind of a lot happened, most of it between the lines.
Fresh out of high school, I attended the University of Texas at Austin. My girlfriend Heidi flew off to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. I’d follow her there in a couple years but I didn’t know that yet. I was a lazy student who didn’t care about school since forever, my folks always pulling their hair out. Back in my senior year of high school, when Mom found out I hadn’t applied to any colleges, she pitched a fit. I barely got into UT, my local state university since I was in Austin and wanted to stay there. UT would take anybody. So after my Party House summer, I moved to the West University neighborhood of student housing, the milieu of the film Slacker which wasn’t made yet but would be soon. That was my life. I took psychology classes, and I told myself I was exploring the mind.
21st Street Co-op
That year I lived at the 21st Street Co-op, a student housing cooperative. There was another co-op right up the street, where 21st Street ended in a T-junction. That co-op was called the Ark. The Ark was a wide building of cinder blocks, painted brown, two stories high. 21st Street had a slight grade to it so the Ark daily loomed up there, like a ruin. It was the bad kid co-op with drug busts and stuff.
But my co-op, simply called the 21st Street Co-op, was the good kid co-op. It was constructed of various dormitory pods, with large windows up to the ceiling in open two-story common rooms, capped by a third floor. The pods were connected by walkways and stairways with blue railings, the co-op would not have been out of place on a beach somewhere or in a biodome, or an Avatar film. We joked it was a Habitrail but the design was airy and free and bright, the opposite of the cave-like vibe of the Ark.
The neighborhood had some apartment buildings but mostly houses converted to student rentals. UT had 50,000 students and a sprawling campus, but life at the 21st Street Co-op felt quiet and intimate. You had to do labor to live there which mostly entailed helping cook dinner for the whole co-op on your assigned night of the week, in the industrial kitchen and the dining hall, which took up the ground floor of the central common building.
Upstairs was a common room with a pool table, ping-pong table, couches, and a media cabinet with big speakers. The room next to that had raised seating like a mini theater, and a big TV for watching the early painful Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. It had a VCR for movie night with screenings of Rollerball and Excalibur. The walkways connected the pods to the central building in a molecular arrangement. The pods, which we called suites, were designated as quiet suites or loud suites. There must have been a moderate designation too. There was only one loud suite. Loud Suite Lara, who shared a house with me the following year, used to walk into the loud suite shouting, “Loud suite!!!” Loud suite had a swing hanging from the high common room ceiling; you could get on the swing from the landing of the stairs winding up the wall to the second-floor rooms. The swing took you over the seating area — a couch and some cushy chairs around a coffee table. All the suites could or should have hung swings but loud suite was the only one that did.
In high school I had started out as a freshman nerd at the bottom of the food chain, but by the time I was a high school senior, I felt like Cyclops of the X-Men running shit. Now at UT, I was a freshman again, with all the big man on campus vibes stripped away. I was a newbie keeping company with cool older kids like Ken, who was 25. Did he still take classes? Was he one of UT’s perpetual students, or had he graduated and just still lived in the student co-op ecosystem? I don’t remember. Ken was very tall, with long brown hair and an overall Geddy Lee vibe, a 1970s guy we might say: blazer, T-shirt, jeans, white sneakers. His superpower was that he was the funniest guy in any room, quick with great stories. We hit it off but it was a little like he adopted me as a younger brother, with him and cool older guy John Haddad mentoring me.
John Haddad was built like canonical Wolverine: shorter but buff, practicing shirtless katana moves on the back lawn. He lived in my suite early on, or I should say, I lived in his suite. I had a single ground floor room and he had a single next to mine. We had back doors onto the alley where I’d sit and smoke. John would not hesitate to pound on the bathroom door if I was taking too long in the shower, and he shouted loud enough for the whole floor to hear, “You aren’t in there masturbating are you?!” I probably was. John and Ken played roleplaying games with a couple other folks, Ken’s friend Brooke and Brooke’s girlfriend, I forget her name sadly, all early-to-mid 20s. I got looped in on the games and the company, felt like I belonged. But compared to them I was an awkward kid.
Jen
Jen and Alice shared a double room downstairs, on the other side of John Haddad’s room from mine. Their back door was a sliding glass one to the back lawn. They were my age or a year older, and we hung out, including with Ken and them. A lot of the journal is Jen and I becoming closer and for all intents and purposes being sort of in love and almost making out and wanting to do it but the timing was never right. My long-distance relationship with Heidi was an open relationship in that we were allowed to stray. It remained mostly theoretical but she was at Sarah Lawrence having naked parties and stuff, so having crushes on other people was within bounds. Jen and I were loving friends. I wouldn’t tell Heidi all the details but I would have if anything actually happened. I was also in a bi-curious phase which never went anywhere but I thought one of the dudes at 21st Street was cute and Heidi was 100% okay with me experimenting or whatever. Heidi and I had a great relationship in that there wasn’t any jealousy, although of course there was and that reared its head eventually. So I was off the chain but I wasn’t a player. I tried casual hookups but I learned at 21st Street that I had no game, I couldn’t close the deal. I still had my looks so I could sometimes attract total babes, but once we started talking they saw I was nervous, dorky. But people who befriended me, like Jen, were capable of falling in love with me and for a while there Jen and I were BFFs.
Jen was pretty with big eyes, very funny and easy to laugh, dressed conventionally I would say, more of a preppy as opposed to a hippie or whatever. She wasn’t a bowhead, but she did her strawberry-blonde hair and wore makeup, skirts, sensible flats. And we would just get to laughing, sharing stories and spending a lot of our time together. She had some nervous energy, would get all up in her head and spin out over stuff. Self-conscious about being a little ditzy, she laughed about it too. She did that thing where she touched the edge of her glasses as if to adjust them even if they didn’t need adjusting. It punctuated her speech, her punchlines when she was being funny, or if she knew she was being cute.
I played wingman in her attempts to date other people. There was another guy named Jim, on the second floor in a suite bordering the front lawn. His room had a balcony. Jen wanted to fuck and/or date him — he was a couple years older, handsome and manly — so she came up with this terrible plan. I think of her plan as a “reverse Juliet” because she wanted to seduce him by climbing a ladder onto his balcony. From there she’d open his sliding glass door, and hop into bed with him. She enlisted me to help with the ladder, which we had access to from a maintenance shed on the back lawn. Her plan was not to go assault this guy, but more like just present herself as immediately available. It was of course a violation of his space and privacy, which we discussed. But ultimately it seemed harmless enough, and it benefitted from having the quality of a caper. I was always up for a caper.
So on the appointed night, when she was reasonably sure he was in there, she put on something diaphanous. The coast was clear. We got the ladder and walked it over below his balcony and put it up. I held the ladder as Jen climbed up and over the railing, and she entered Jim’s room through the sliding glass door. I felt like, “Well, that’s that,” and started walking the ladder back to the storage shed. But as I was passing the side of the suite, Jen came walking quickly out the second floor door onto the walkway. She had not spent one moment in Jim’s room; she’d walked in through his balcony door, and proceeded directly out his front door. And she was muttering, saying, “I have never been so humiliated in my entire life!” She joined me in an absolute tizzy. “What happened?” I asked, “He wasn’t interested?” She said, “No, it’s worse than that — he was in bed with another man!” Things had gone from a reverse Juliet to a double Romeo. Jim said it was just a friend of his.
Alice
I was also friends with Alice, who dated an alum from my high school, Sam, who allegedly had walked away from a pregnant girl back then. Sam smoked me out on my first night in my first suite, but we never became pals. The story of him and the pregnant girl hung over his head and he was aware that I heard it and, unprompted, he explained it away. In fact I had known the girl in question, we had kissed at a house party once in high school until I said the wrong thing and she sent me away. So I had a vague unrequited feeling about her and I wished I hadn’t said the thing, some objectifying remark I forget, but I offended her and she stood up for herself and sent me packing. I ran into her — possibly as she was leaving Sam’s room one time? Were they still in each other’s orbit? — and she expressed some regret that she had rejected me for being a little bit stupid, and then she had dated this fucking guy. I never saw her after that. Alice started dating him and had a hard time and it didn’t last long.
There was a mutual attraction between Alice and myself. She had bleached blonde hair, was petite, smart, funny, all the rest of it. She was sharp and pointed, angular peregrine-faced. For Halloween that year she dressed up as a “sexy librarian” with a hilarious flirty thing which really worked for me. But nothing ever happened and there was jealousy between her and Jen over how intense my friendship was with Jen. I was “Jen’s” so Alice couldn’t have me, or something, and for that matter Jen was “mine” so Alice couldn’t have Jen either.
Alice and I did hang out though. She worked at the Steve’s Ice Cream on the drag by the Dobie theater, across from the GM Steakhouse which had speakers set up outside so the cooks could insult passers-by they saw through the windows. We’d visit her at work and goof around, and we’d all go to the steakhouse and the movies together. Alice was my wingman the night some of us ate four grams of mushrooms each. Jen was dating a guy named Ed by this time, and we all lived in different suites as we changed rooms quarter to quarter. Ed procured the shrooms.
Ed had skater vibes with his phat shorts that hung below the knee. He was tall and his straight, brown hair was short enough to stand on its own. He thought “Bob Dobbs” was hilarious, cracking us up with SubGenius humor saying, “Cut me some SLACK!” – slack, the most valuable substance. Ed was into industrial rock. He drove a big green car with curb feelers, a Lincoln or a caddy — his dad’s car. Driving, Ed listened to the pop station and I asked him how he could do it if he was really into industrial. He said if he wasn’t listening to serious music, he needed something light and forgettable, and “there’s nothing in between.”
I remember our “four grams” mushroom dose in particular because it seemed large to me, more than I’d ever taken. Ed dumped the bag of shrooms onto a Skinny Puppy album cover and divided it by hand into equal portions for those of us involved — himself, Jen, me, and Steve from the loud suite. Alice took some too but a small portion like maybe a gram, just a taste. Then we roamed the night around the co-op, splitting apart and rejoining at intervals. Poor Alice had taken too little and it wasn’t kicking in. We found ourselves alone on the upper floor balcony outside the central common room, facing the front lawn and 21st Street. I was speechless as the lawn opened up into a vortex of bright Mayan-Aztec designs and I said, “Wowww …” but that’s as articulate as I could be. Alice wanted me to describe it, to draw her in, but how could I tell her I’d discovered a timeless fountain of art and religion from the next dimension? My hair was blown back by the maelstrom in the lawn. “What’s going on?” Alice asked, “Make it happen for me …” But I could not.
The Gun in the Lake
At some point that night I was swinging on the ceiling swing in the loud suite while folks on the couch below were trying to take bong hits but I was stirring up so much wind, it kept blowing the lighter out. I didn’t understand the issue, thought anything goes in the loud suite. They asked me to cool it and I rebuffed them, and wound up feeling foolish that I had been a bummer. The room got so tense that Ed said “Oh man” and split. Steve told me, “That really was quite a wind you were stirring up there.” I apologized, realizing I had done a thing that made me less cool, a familiar situation.
Later I was in my room, it was like 3 a.m. but no one who was shrooming was asleep. Jen showed up at my door wearing an Army helmet and carrying a handgun. She’d borrowed them from Steve, who’d been in the Army — and she was going around being funny doing a bit. But I was a little freaked out, like, Jesus I sort of don’t want a gun around, you know? I don’t truly remember if it was a real gun or a pellet gun or a replica, it didn’t matter, although I think it was a real .45. Jen waved it around and it was a bad trip for me even though she’d been getting laughs from everyone else. I said, “It’s a gun, for cryin’ out loud!” This made her feel bad and she fled in tears.
At the time there was some plumbing being done, such that a portion of the sidewalk walkway between suites had been torn up, leaving a small, shallow pit filled with water, probably not more than a couple feet deep, with orange cones around it until the job could be completed. Jen returned to my room later in the night, breathless and upset about how she had spooked me with the gun and she apologized. We held each other, close to dawn. I asked her where the gun was and she said, “I threw it in the lake.” By this she meant the pool of water in the sidewalk. I asked, “… you threw Steve’s gun in the water?” She confirmed it and said Steve didn’t care. I know she was tripping, but it was so Jen. All she knew was the gun had given me a bad time and she felt so bad she didn’t care if the gun belonged to Steve, or if Steve might not want it thrown in the water at all. She just knew it had to go. I bet Steve didn’t care because he was on four grams of mushrooms and had bigger things to worry about. After she left, I wrote in my journal, “The gun is in the lake and Steve doesn’t care.”
Passages about Jen include the following, where I refer to her as Jen and Jennifer interchangeably:
January 25th 3:14 AM. Tonight Jennifer was here for the party and she told me that even if she was in love with somebody like really in love that I would still be her best friend. I was so touched I gave her a big hug and a kiss on the forehead. I love her so much. I felt bad — honesty forbade me to call her other than ‘One of my best friends,’ not ‘Best.’” I did not want to call her my best friend because that was Heidi’s and my thing. I had a few best friends really. But Jen and I were inseparable for months.
January 27 – 12:12 AM: Yesterday I went to Jen’s room for din-din and Alice was there too which is not surprising owing to the fact that she lives there and I was still holding a part of myself away from her, but she was talking and listening and soliciting advice and almost, it seemed, holding me in high regard. I cannot yet bring myself to fully let go as I have with Jen, and I’m not sure if the chance will ever present itself. I love Jen as my own.
I’m moving into 1B4 [IB4? A different room in a different suite] tomorrow. A new beginning/era/phase/stage/opportunity. And Ed is in that suite too.
Saturday the 30th, 1:55PM: The hullabaloo last night was quite insane and I just realized its character isn’t quite as out-of-character as I thought. Alice blowing up at Me & Jen for Jen being reluctant and me trying to fix it between Us (of course Alice wouldn’t understand that) and Jake the Snake Running Off back to the Ark. Kinda typical in my life.
Jennifer was so upset. It was a tad bit of a self-perpetuated a-little-too-much-thrust-there-Jennifer breakdown. But Jennifer is not a liar, and all of her reason for upset was definitely genuine, and it was important for her to get it out. She maybe could have thought about it in more healthy ways. She could have realized that perhaps her concern was a bit excessive. But on the other hand, we completely opened up to each other.
[…] I told Jennifer of my secret fantasy for us to sleep together once just before she leaves for the summer, maybe leaving for a long time. [….] I was really trippin’ hard earlier on the fact I have such incredible people in my life such as Jennifer.
Wednesday, February 3rd, 12:35 AM: Me and Jen had a little misunderstanding tonight regarding my feelings concerning her love life, but we cleared ’em up and talked for about two hours on the phone later on. I love her so much.
Friday Feb. 18th, 12:40AM: Jen and Ed are together and Jen is already nervous and it’s only been a couple days and my god Jen just accept your happiness. Please.
Feb. 30th, I believe — 1:30AM Wednesday at any rate: I’m beginning to believe that me & Jen are inevitable. Last night she and Ed had a huge fight and after I played TMNT [the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game] with the crew — I talked a good long while with Ed about it — Then Jen came over to his room around 3:30-3:45 and I left to go to bed — I was asleep when much later, Jen came into my room and asked for a pillow so she could sleep on my floor. In a daze I gave her a pillow, but then she realized she’d be uncomfortable and I realized we should talk, so then I heard her side — she was sitting on the bed and everything was so cool and she was lying on the bed and we had our arms around each other and were telling each other how much we loved each other and I don’t believe I can stress how cool things were. The only problem (if one chooses to call it a problem) is that I had a just-woke-up boner and […] it kept me from holding her as close as I wanted to as I hid it from her. I told her she could sleep the night, and she was sorely tempted but had to get up early and had things to do — But she said, ‘Can I have a rain check on your bed though? Sleeping here would mean so much to me.’ I assured her that the feeling was mutual and that the rain check was given.
I remember staring into her beautiful eyes, realizing for the umpteenth time what a gorgeous face she has, and knowing that I have a true friend in Jen.
April 9th, 5:00AM: Tonight I felt me and Jen on the edge — as friends we can be very dependent on one another — I hope not too dependent — but I know tonight was again perhaps her and Ed’s last night as a couple (AAAAGGGH!) and Jen was reeling from that — I, on the other hand, am still slightly ‘reeling’ from Heidi’s departure [she had just visited for a few days on her spring break], in that I’ve felt like giving a big fat hug to everyone I see, and just feeling affectionate and affection-starved all around — I’m sure Heidi is feeling the same way, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she slept with [her Sarah Lawrence crush] soon — more power to ya, Heids — Get yours and wish me luck in finding mine — I sense the two-backed Jim/Jen creature somewhere in the future but tonight I think we both knew it was too soon, if not way too soon — I would’ve betrayed Ed if it’d happened tonight — and Ed is one person I know I will never betray. Not to mention me & Jen.
So I was not going to betray Ed, but I was not going to betray me and Jen either. And I was not going to betray Heidi — I didn’t think that was possible. But soon I would have to square this circle.
Heidi
To understand what finally happened with me, Jen, and Ed, you have to understand Heidi. A mutant goth punk hippie, she is the one who gave me the journal in the first place. She spent time writing on the first few pages with a calligraphy pen and black India ink, poems and deep thoughts and love stuff to me; she drew the runes on the cover and included readings from her runes in red ink (almost everyone I ever dated practiced some form of divination). Then she gave me the journal over Christmas break on the cusp of 1987 turning into 1988. The next few pages of the journal are Heidi and I writing collaboratively, several days of trading off, observing each other, and making in-jokes. She was a creative genius and said hilarious things like, “If I were standing up right now, I’d be falling down,” and “We can sail the seven hypotheses.” And then she flew back to Sarah Lawrence and I used the journal to document 1988 at the co-op. So it starts late in the school year; I had already become close to Jen and these other friends and the scene was in motion. But most of the journal is really about Heidi and our relationship.
We talked often on the phone and all her Sarah Lawrence friends knew me as a virtual presence, between Heidi talking me up and the frequent phone calls, where she would put her friends on the phone with me. Likewise, my 21st Street friends knew about Heidi. She visited me a couple times that year and always made a splash, even though we spent most of our time holed up in my room, having sex and sharing wine and reading stuff to each other — she loved it when I read X-Men to her in bed. And we would go to dinner in the dining hall and socialize and she met everybody and everybody liked her. Her strong personality made her a real individual and I was proud of her and our relationship. Almost every time I wrote about her in the journal, after talking with her on the phone or whatever, I gushed about us being soulmates, but mostly about us being best friends. Reading the journal in 2026, I’m like, why do I mention we’re best friends so much, as if I have to make it true with repetition. I made that point in the journal once, writing, “It’s so true I don’t know why I keep mentioning it.”
Her strong personality meant she loved me up real good. She moved heaven and earth for me — got her friend Marilyn to buy me a plane ticket so I could visit them at Sarah Lawrence, then “borrowed” another friend’s car to get me back to the airport for my departure. Nothing could stop her. She bent reality to her will even if you didn’t want it bent. My X-Men metaphor holds true because she was a redhead with potentially destructive powers. She was reading my mind and moving objects with her thoughts, and I felt like, “All I’ve got are these eye lasers.” Taking psychedelics with her was intense, the gravity of her mind drove every conversation, buffeting me with psychokinetic forces I barely understood.
The Little Pink House
So eventually Jen and Ed got back together and moved into the basement apartment of a little pink house across town. They were there I think a few weeks at the end of the school year. It meant seeing Jen less but we still socialized. We went to a party once and ran into Alice, who also had moved out of 21st Street and acted like she wasn’t glad to see me. Jen told me later she didn’t know why but you know Alice. Meanwhile, Heidi and I were looking for a place to cohabitate for the summer, so when Jen and Ed decided to move out of the little pink house, we had an in there. I didn’t fully appreciate that I was leaving 21st Street Co-op forever.
Heidi and I didn’t have tableware, so as we were moving in and they were moving out, Jen let us hold onto their tray of spoons and forks and butter knives. She said she would need them back within a couple months, so we knew it was on us to supply ourselves with utensils by then.
I found a dishwashing job within biking distance at a little rotisserie chicken place. The owner pulled me off of dishwashing for a while to have me leaflet downtown with flyers for the lunch special. He told me to go to every floor in every building and leave flyers at every office. It took weeks but by the time I was done, I owned the town. Pictures of the Austin skyline made me think, “I’ve seen each floor in every one of those buildings.” I got inside the city and now it’s inside me.
A lot of things happened that summer in the little pink house. I will give some highlights for flavor before I tell you what happened with Jen and Ed.
Ken the ’70s guy moved out of the co-op and his house wasn’t too far away, so Heidi, Ken, and I visited back and forth, playing role-playing games, renting movies like Phantasm and The Hunger. There was an abandoned building site near the little pink house which had been tagged with large letters, “Austin Boondoggle Ruins.” The site featured two skeletal steel towers that Ken and I climbed one night. I chickened out near the top while he sat above me saying, “The view is just a little better up here,” enticing me higher than I wanted to go. Saying no to him felt like an act of enormous strength but I knew I’d reached my limit.
Heidi and I had sex on LSD to “Hounds of Love” and I astrally discorporated while going down on her, found myself lost, floating, involved with a star nursery sex organ the size of the universe on cosmic timescales. But she pulled me back to my body. Whenever she put on “Magic Carpet Ride,” I knew she was horny. Whenever she wore her cream camisole, I knew she wanted it backward. We had a pack of condoms although she was on the pill; one day while she was at work at Mad Dog’s, I masturbated in the shower. My dick was sore because we’d been having a lot of sex so I put on a condom so I wouldn’t chafe myself all to hell while I completed the act. When Heidi came home she saw the used condom in the bathroom trashcan and excitedly came to me asking, “Who did you have sex with?!” She was stoked about it, that was so great, it wasn’t an accusation. I didn’t know what she was talking about at first but then I was like, “Oh, I was masturbating and I put it on so I wouldn’t be so sore.” And she knew I was telling the truth, a perfect case of an essential genuine non-jealousy. I am struck by the fact that we were banging all the time but I still had enough energy to masturbate when she wasn’t around, and I was probably fantasizing about her when I did it.
We had friction trying to quit smoking. There were still cigarettes around and every now and then she would light one up. And that made me want to smoke so I’d light one up too. That bugged her and she would say she just wanted to have a smoke on her own and not cause me to smoke at the same time. I also did not want that to happen, but I thought we were quitting together, yet she was still smoking. I felt like a worm for not being strong enough to resist when she lit up. I let what she did define what I did.
I wasn’t a total worm. Once Jake the Snake biked over and the three of us visited on the front stoop. He mentioned he was out there stealing bikes and selling them cheap. I was like, “Jesus, typical Jake,” but Heidi goes, “Can you steal me one?” and he agreed to. I said, “What about the person whose bike gets stolen? Why would you do that to them?” She was so punk she didn’t care, Dark Phoenix mode. I argued harm to one is harm to all. But she was unmoved by these faceless individuals.
One night we found ourselves downtown on foot with a long walk home. We could afford a bus ride, but the bus we got on was not going to our neighborhood. We sat in the front and she applied all the psychic pressure she could to the bus driver. She was like, “But why can’t you just get us closer? It doesn’t make any difference to you and it would really help us out,” and so on, and he was flatly resisting her like, “Ma’am, that’s not how it works. I’m not allowed to deviate from my route,” and on and on it went. I pleaded with Heidi to just forget it and we could walk, it was not going to be so bad. But she trained her powers on the driver and eventually, improbably, possessed his will. He got us to within a few blocks of the little pink house even though he didn’t want to. She had moved a bus with her mind.
Dark Phoenix Wasn’t Having It
So then it was a Sunday morning in early August. Heidi and I lay naked in bed (a small mattress on the floor) under a sheet when Jen and Ed stopped over. We called them in and they stood in the bedroom doorway talking with us. They had come to collect their tableware like they’d said they would at the start of the summer, so I didn’t think anything of it. But Dark Phoenix wasn’t having it. And Jen put her foot down and they argued while Ed and I hung back mortified. Ed said, “Oh man …” like he did that time I stirred up too much wind on the swing in the loud suite. Heidi was in my arms shouting at Jen, “You’re going to leave us with NOTHING!” and, “You can’t leave us a FORK?” And Jen, somehow immune, was just like, “It’s my silverware and I told you guys I needed it back by now, this is on you.” I tried to talk to Heidi like I did when she moved the bus, but just like that time, my words bounced off her blazing energies.
Jen and Ed collected their stuff and left. I never saw or spoke with them again. I didn’t know where they were living, I didn’t have their new number, and I never ran into them. It was a clean break with nothing to do about it. I could have asked Ken, but the crash-out pitted the couples against each other. I’m sure Jen wished I’d taken her side and denounced my girlfriend, but I didn’t so the world of Jen’s and my friendship cracked apart. I should have jumped up naked from the mattress, yanked the sheet away showing Heidi’s bare ass, and left with Jen and Ed, sheet wrapped around me like a toga. “I’m going to go live with Jen and Ed and these forks.” But Heidi and I weren’t done yet.
At the end of the summer I arranged to be housemates with Loud Suite Lara, who’d found a two-bedroom place not far from the co-op, our own little loud suite. Heidi left for Sarah Lawrence before I moved out of the little pink house and I was alone there boxing the last of my stuff. I opened the bedroom closet door and found one of my belts hanging on the inside doorknob. Heidi had left it for me, knew I would find it. She’d given it a twist and fastened it closed, so it was in the shape of a Möbius strip, the figure-eight loop and infinity sign, where two sides become one. It had been sort of rocky there at the end between us. But like with everything she did, even when she was terrible there was magic and power. The silent belt hanging on the doorknob cut through the noise, telegraphing our highs and hopes. I teared up, warmed in the universe of love that she knew would be communicated directly to me and only me. No one else who found it would be able to read the sign or to recognize that it was a sign at all, a lover’s telepathy like in the Russian novels.
Thirty years passed — several lifetimes — while my journal languished in storage. Heidi and I had broken up so long ago, she was more of a conceptual object than an ex-girlfriend. One day I rediscovered the journal and read it. I’d remembered Jen fondly of course, and I always wished it hadn’t ended so badly. But I’d forgotten more about that year than I thought. I read the revelatory passages about Jen in disbelief. “My god … we were in love.” Memories flooded back: the constant confessions of love, the holding each other that never gave way.
An index of Jim Richardson’s essays can be found here.