ASPIRATION: 2 First Love

Winnipeg, Early 1960s

When love is not madness it is not love.

- Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Is love only just a kind of madness? That’s a genuine question for anyone to consider, and one not just for philosophers!

The story of my first liaison with a female began in a small Winnipeg café called The Chocolate Shop, long gone now but once located somewhere on the right-hand side of the photo above. Visits to such venues had now become viable owing to my ownership of a car, a 1949 Pontiac that I had bought for $100 from my friend Willard, who had dropped out of school three years before. I should explain that that sum of money was part of a stash I had, the proceeds of working during the previous summer holiday for the City of Winnipeg as a park attendant, whose primary duty was to maintain the park's pool at a predetermined pH level.

On the occasion in question, I was in the company of another friend, Larry, and I imagine that we had traipsed into this place out of naked boredom, since Winnipeg was hardly a hub of evening entertainment. But we took seats at a table and were mumbling about something or nothing when two girls strolled in and slid into seats at a table to my left. One of the newcomers was quite comely, at least to my unrefined taste at the time, and shapely too, while her friend was short and plump and plain. Larry rotated his neck to look them over a couple of times – none too subtly as was his wont – and then turned to me with a grin.

“Should I start talking to them?” he asked.

I knew he would. Talk to anybody, Larry would.

“Sure,” I said, “if you want to, but I get the one on the left.”

As the one on the left was by far the prettier one, I half-hoped this demand to relinquish his right to first choice might restrain him, for Larry’s manner could prove embarrassing at times, and I wasn’t looking for a public rebuff. Also, I was somewhat doubtful about my own likely handling of this affair, since my earlier relations with girls had been largely limited to watching them from afar.

“I’m not particular,” Larry grinned again and turned to address these two contrasting examples of the fair sex.

To my acute amazement, he got a positive response. The plump one at least answered his patter, and moments later he had negotiated a passage into their booth. The girl I slid next to was called Brenda, as it happened, while Larry had paired himself off with her friend June. I was nineteen years of age at the time, but my idea of womanhood was childlike, founded as it was principally on fitful, sometimes embarrassed, and always anxious exchange with Judy Taylor, a fellow pupil of mine at Sissler High.

This first mistress of my dreams I'd once succeeded in escorting to a school dance, but I never dared to profane those sainted lips with a kiss. She ended up 'going steady', in the parlance of the time, with my best friend, Grant Scott, but that's another story, and a common too, I bet!

Now here I was again, with senses mesmerised by the lure of a pretty girl’s perfume. And she was being genial! I could easily have encircled her shoulders with my arm, but sadly I had no words to encircle her soul, not so much as a single sweet nothing to whisper into her ear.

The plain fact of the matter was that I lacked any firm notion of how to behave in the presence of girls, compared with many lads of my age – and I knew it. The experience I sought now – boy meets girl, boy kisses girl, boy maybe does more interesting things with girl – this experience some boys had had by the age of fourteen. But it had eluded me.

Why?

That question had hammered at my brain till I was sick of it. It’s not that I had lacked opportunity. I’d had as many or as few opportunities as any other lad of my age. But a burning nervousness, confusion and embarrassment in the company of girls had always held me back.

At times I asked myself if I were quite normal, for this almost pathological reserve in the face of femininity had grown by now into a dense and imprisoning forest. Could I ever find my way out of it?

I did not feel at all sure. Though I now found myself chatting with an apparently affable and accessible female, whose pink lips and satin skin and raven hair inflamed my senses with their nearness, she seemed still as impossibly distant as a star.

Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, early 1960s (The Chocolate Shop was further down on the right hand side)

But the issue of this unforeseen meeting was that my friend and I conducted the girls home and then were blessed with their presence several times during the following weeks. Brenda was slightly older than me at twenty. That was her chronological age, but in experience she was a lot more knowing than I. She had apparently perfected a certain worldliness of manner, a kind of cool serenity in the face of life's trials, probably copied from the conduct of some movie queen of the era, but underneath that smooth surface, as I learned later to my cost, a cauldron of hostility was bubbling.

I bite my lip in bitter wisdom when I think what a minefield of feminine wiles I had so dumbly blundered into. Tall and strong as I was in body, my mind had not outgrown the green and tender notions of earnest, hopeful childhood. I never had the remotest hope of coping with that girl.

‘“Come into my parlour,” said the spider to the fly.’

My association with Brenda miscarried right from the start. Whenever we four ventured out for an evening's entertainment, the romantic emanations radiating from the clinch between Larry and June in the back seat of my car parked outside one or other of the girls’ houses provoked nothing more in me, sitting rigidly in front with a pretty girl by my side - who had sometimes signalled her availability by some manner of queenly means - than a greater volume of talk. Maybe I was awed by her studied self-possession and her movie queen veneer.

But things came to a head one night when Larry and I took the girls to a drive-in movie, with Larry doing the driving this time and June in the passenger seat, a scheme devised by me to frame conditions more conducive to a bit of billing and cooing with Brenda in the back. Maybe my performance would be better, I conjectured, if it were less prominently on display.

Drive-in movie

The film we’d gone to watch was A Farewell to Arms, starring Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones, but the giant figures on the screen, bright against the night sky, were moving in unaccountable and mysterious ways, for they meant less than chaff to me, and the slotted box that dangled from June’s window issued disconnected and unaccountable sounds. All my thoughts were bent on Brenda, red-lipped and enticing beside me.

She’d nestled warmly against the arm I’d summoned the nerve to slip behind her neck, but the slight turn of the head that was called for, and the gentle bending of the face toward hers seemed an impossible feat, for the dread of rejection lay heavy upon my heart and I shrank from the act, as from a crime, of doing this most normal and natural thing.

If I did do the decisive deed, I mused, what would she do? Would she turn her face away? Would she say: 'Don’t'? or 'Please, don’t'? as women sometimes did in films. Or would she merely remain lifeless in my arms? How did a fellow kiss a girl anyway? Exactly how? I mean. How precisely did you hold the lips? Did you pucker and project them, as kids did? They didn’t seem to do so in films. I was fully nineteen years of age now, I'd been earning a living for nearly a year and I was about to embark on a career as an officer in the Canadian Army. But I had learned absolutely nothing about the language of love!

I tortured myself with kindred thoughts, affecting to watch the film and attempting to steel myself for the rejection I’d convinced myself I was going to get. The film! What did that matter? The only drama that mattered to me was the one I was botching with Brenda here in the back seat of my car!

While the figures on the screen looming in the night sky lived and loved and fought and died, nothing happened in the back seat of my car. Nothing! I was as motionless as a mummy in an Egyptian tomb. But all my senses were bent on Brenda, curled in my arm. I cursed myself for letting the moment for action slip by. I must do something, and do it soon, before the film faded to an end.

And then suddenly the opportunity I sought was offered. I had turned to Brenda and spoken a word or two, and when I fell silent again she calmly raised her hand, removed the spectacles she’d donned to watch the film and looked me straight in the face.

She was handing me the opportunity I sought. All that was wanted now was a slight movement, a dozen inches, no more. I had to do it now! No more procrastination! No more thinking! It was time to act! She wanted me to do it! She was willing me to do it! The film was in its dying moments. It had to be now! At last disgust at my everlasting woodenness seized me and I made a lunge…

Then, with an inexpressibly delicate movement, she calmly turned her face away. Just turned it away! I retracted my head into my collar like a tortoise retracting its head into its shell, my ears stinging with humiliation. And now the girl turned coolly back to me, looked me straight in the face and calmly said:

“Are you some kind of nut?”

I was mortally stunned. Nobody had ever said that in a film – at least in any film I’d ever seen. The shame of it! I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? But after a time the tortoise tentatively extended its head out of its collar and attempted explanations of how he... ah... had... er... ah... never kissed a girl before.

A mortifying confession – that. But Brenda was emphatically delighted with it. She beamed with enchantment.

“I’ll teach you!” she gushed, opening her arms wide, radiant with maternal concern.

“No!” I snarled. My pride had been crushed too much.

But I was in her power now, or I suppose she thought I was. From that evening onward there was never any chance that any positive passion or compassion would ever distinguish our relationship. The sole legacy left in the debris of that disastrous evening was a mutual animosity.

Sometimes, for instance, when we four were chatting in the parked car somewhere in the city she would turn half-circle to face the couple in the back and then press her ample breasts into the crook of my outstretched arm. More than once she had a mind to needle me that way.

Sometimes she turned to outright hostility. On the homeward journey after an evening out in the town she would attempt to dictate directions.

“Turn here,” she would decree, as if delivering an order to a chauffeur, just as we were speeding past a road junction.

I knew the city like the back of my hand and had favourite routes to wherever I wanted to go, and anyway the – command – came just too late to make the turn without slamming on the brakes, and I just drove on.

“I told you to turn there!” she would scream.

It appeared that having discovered a malfunction in my manhood, she wanted to turn this botched mechanism to her own account and control me like a robot. But with geography I was a lot more confident than I was with kissing, and I stood my ground in the clash that always followed. However, I found myself now gazing into the inner soul that displayed this pretty painted face, and wondered whether, notwithstanding my long-neglected thirst for feminine charms, it was in fact wise to try to quench it at such a turbulent stream.

How long we maintained that crazy relationship, I don’t recall, for neither I nor Brenda – much to my surprise – was able to terminate it. In the end I just fled to the army.