A Straight Gay Boy and Woodstock Nation
Chapter 23: A summer of (lost) love
As the end of the semester approaches, Sue tells me her parents have gotten her a summer camp counselor job in the Rocky Mountains. She has no interest, but they are adamant. She’s broken up about leaving me for three months but sees no way out.
Richard has secured seaman’s cards for his nephew Terry and I, however, which let us ship out for the summer with the Merchant Marine, so I will be at sea anyway.
I worry because Sue’s parents have never sent her to camp before. Why now? As I mull this over, I recall Sue mentioning some guy named Charles Weil her mother recently set her up with. She went under protest, complaining about how boring he was, but she had to go to please her mother.
I had thought this was a non-issue, but now I wondered. His name sounds suspiciously uptown. In New Orleans, social class is everything, and I have none. I am a nobody whose mom is a glorified secretary kept by a lawyer. I must be a social disaster to her family if not to her.
We are in love after all.
On our last night, we sit in the dark on her front steps kissing deep, long, and hard. I allow my hands to reach for her body, caressing gently, moving under her blouse. She leans in eagerly. My hand moves up her smooth tanned leg under her pleated skirt. I move slowly so she can stop me if she wants, but she does not.
Finally, I gently touch her sex through her panties as she moans quietly and returns my kisses. I dare not push further, not yet. We have nothing ahead of us but time, and I have nothing to prove other than that I am gentle, considerate, and worthy. We weep over tomorrow’s parting. We again profess our love, one we know will last.
I see her off at the airport with her family. She cries and kisses me lusciously right in front of them. She promises to write.
Then I am off to Tampa to board a molten-sulfur tanker running between Cotzocalocas, Mexico, and Baltimore. I serve as a steward helping prepare and serve three meals a day. The running joke among the crew is that nobody could survive a shipwreck, that water and liquid sulfur mix to create deadly hydrochloric acid.
Terry and I laugh this off and settle into the rhythm of shipboard life.
After a few days, we arrive at a shabby Mexican port where we will take on the sulfur and its brimstone odor that soaks into everything. The crew take us to the only air-conditioned hotel for a few drinks in the bar. After a couple of Carte Blancas, we all taxi to “The Hill,” the out-of-town red-light district.
I know what the amused crew expect of us and am only concerned about venereal disease, seeing rubbers are nowhere in evidence. Somebody assures us the women are government inspected weekly, are perfectly healthy. So I’m faced with another opportunity to prove my virility.
We enter an open-air bar to find several women sizing us up. As the sun sets, we drink more beer under lazy ceiling fans and bare bulbs. Dusk brings out hoards of swarming, chirping beetles. They seem to disturb nobody but me.
The crew smirks wondering what we college boys will do. Terry and I confer and agree blow jobs seem the safest choice. After dodging a heavily pregnant woman determined to land me, I settle on a lip-sticked blonde. Terry finds a woman to his taste, and we follow them down a musty, dirty concrete-block corridor.
After my girl shuts the door and collects my twenty dollars, she undresses and pulls a worn, sad pink teddy bear off the bed. She must live in this tiny room. She lies down, spreads her legs, and says “Fucky, fucky!” while she pulls apart pink lips with red fingernails.
I drop my pants but am so nervous I’m not hard. She laughs, pointing at my dick and humiliating me. Fortunately, at only nineteen, a few quick yanks solve the problem, and she coos at the transformation.
Now it is my turn to say “No fucky, fucky…… sucky, sucky!” as I point to my dick and her mouth. She jumps up furiously, shouting “No, No, No!” The door swings open and a tall burly man in a filthy shirt aggressively motions me to dress and get out. I am taken down the hall and brusquely shown out a side door to the street. My demands for my money are ignored. The same happens to Terry. We taxi back to the ship and decide not to mention the outcome to the crew, who we hope will respect us at least a little more.
As we sail on to Baltimore to discharge our cargo, Terry and I are set to chipping and painting. We work cramped up in steamy spaces exposed to nauseating, skin burning, headache-inducing chemicals.
At night, Terry lies in his bunk in our three-man cabin reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which makes me feel like one in comparison, so I resolve to read it when I get home.
Meanwhile, I watch him each night with his book in his left hand and his right hand down his underwear endlessly toying with his pubic hair. Terry is olive-skinned and darkly handsome. His behavior is so arousing, I regularly run to the head to masturbate, disappointed that sailor fantasies don’t seem to happen on this ship. The only dick I see is our cabin mate’s hard-on tenting his trousers while he naps. It’s not much, but I never forget it.
After Baltimore, we head back to Tampa where we learn the voyage has been cut short after just over a month. The company flies us back to New Orleans. I use some of my 450.00 dollar cash windfall as a down payment on my first car, a used 1965 Austin Healey Sprite, which Joanie’s older brother Neal finds for me. He also loans me the balance, and I pay him twenty-five dollars a month. Their parents approve of me and think I am worth the investment. I hope Sue’s parents will see me the same way.
I love my car and affix a colorful stained-glass-looking peace symbol to the rear window.
Several letters from Sue wait for me, full of love and tears. I write her back about my brief time at sea, omitting The Hill of course. And then, a package arrives.
Inside is a shoebox covered in colored construction paper decorated with hand-drawn drawn hearts and flowers, along with Kahil Gibran quotations. A long sweet letter describes her activities and tells me how much she loves and misses me. There is also a copy of Gibran’s The Prophet.
I gather the other kids up there have ‘turned her on” to this, which is not surprising. After all, 1967 is already known as the Summer of Love and the hippie thing is growing rapidly even if it has not exploded in New Orleans.
On July 20, 1969, I watch the Apollo XI moon landing live with Anthony, Joanie, and Neal. Walter Cronkite narrates as we listen, astonished, to Neal Armstrong saying, “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” I write to Sue later, knowing somewhere in the Rockies, she had to have been watching too.
Then I get a note from Alan who is avoiding Vietnam by training for the Navy submarine service in Connecticut. He writes he is going to something called the Woodstock Pop Festival. I save the flyer he enclosed with circles on the acts he is excited to see. Janis Joplin, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Credence Clearwater, Canned Heat, and others we both love. I wish I were going too, but I know Sue is coming home soon. She drops a brief note with her flight details, and I plan our reunion.
One day in late August, I bring a bunch of daisies to welcome her at the airport. I make uncomfortable small talk with her family at the gate until passengers begin to file out of the jetway.
Her sister sees her first and calls out. The rest of us look but only recognize Sue when we hear her. This is not the Sue who left in late May. Her hair, under a big floppy hat I have never seen before, is longer, wavy, and unkempt. She pulls the hat off to reveal a beaded Native American headband. Parts of her hair are in long fine braids with a few colored beads knotted in the ends.
They clack together as she runs to her sister.
Tangles of love beads swing from her neck over a colorful peasant blouse. She is wearing denim bell-bottoms and brown leather sandals. Over her shoulder is a fringed buckskin bag. Sue has transformed into the hippest of hippies. A lot must have happened in Colorado.
We all clamor to greet her.
I manage to thrust my flowers into her hands, but she quickly hands them off to someone as we head to baggage claim. She talks animatedly to her parents and walks between them as we head down the concourse, but she does not look for me. At baggage claim, she still has no time for me, and I am embarrassed. To save face, I go tell her to catch up with her family and I will call her later.
I call the next day. She doesn’t answer but her mother says she will call me back. She does not. Over the next few days, I call repeatedly, leaving awkward messages which are never returned. Eventually, I understand that we are no longer “we.”.
I am heartbroken, humiliated, and caught completely off guard. It dawns on me that Sue’s parents sent her to camp hoping something like this would happen, that with a few weeks away she would get over me … and they were right.
While I am troubled and disappointed, I recognize Sue has changed so radically that maybe it’s for the best. The Sue I loved so dearly is either gone or never existed at all. In any case, I move on. Resilience is one of my strengths.
I believe love will come again. After all, I have been in love with three different girls. While I still look at men sometimes, I am more confident than ever that that was a just footnote to my life. After this dramatic love-at-first-sight, how could I think otherwise?
A few years later, after I am married and in Tulane Law School, I see a wedding announcement in the Times Picayune celebrating the union of Sue Wentworth and Charles Weil. More recently, a Google search reveals that although they still live in the area, she is now Sue Wentworth again and they live separately after apparently having had one son. Somehow the idea of their divorce relieves me. I am not the only one with a failed marriage. Had we married, we too would have divorced. The Sue I knew seemed destined for better.
But then, I never really knew Sue, did I?
That summer would become a landmark in other ways. Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon and his words that summer night would go down in history. So, in a smaller way, would Wood Stock Nation, a cultural milestone of peace and love not likely to ever be repeated, and a symbol of everything the conservative right hated and would fight for decades to subdue. Notably, however, the diversity and inclusivity of 1969 Woodstock, like the Summer of Love of 1967 before it, did not extend to gays and lesbians, much less other sexual minorities, all of whom were still outlaws.
At the end of June 1969, the Stonewall riots exploded in Manhattan’s West Village when lesbians, drag queens, and others fought police harassment in the city’s gay bars. If it even made the news in New Orleans, I missed it. It held no relevance for me, anyway, because I was not gay.
