Free It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive by Evan Handler

first sexually loaded kiss at fourteen. The girl’s name was Joanna, and we were seventeen days into a four-week American Youth Hostels bicycle trip. Joanna had been open until then about her interest in Brett, a sixteen-year-old member of the group. Brett was six feet tall, a sharp-jawed, straight-haired, chiseled piece of teenage dreamdom. I was five-foot-four, weighed barely a hundred pounds, and had a tangled mess of wildly uncombed hair. Over the course of our six-hundred-mile journey, I was mistaken for a girl more often than my new girlfriend.
    But Brett was a trifle odd. He’d started boasting, about one week out on the road, that he hadn’t showered since setting off from Manhattan – and that he didn’t intend to until he was back home again. Our entire trip was scheduled to last thirty days, and Brett kept his word.
    It took Joanna seventeen days to change her mind. I’ll never know what would have happened had Brett decided to bathe after sixteen. But Joanna and I were never really a “couple.” Even our late-night, sleeping-bags-next-to-each-other-on-the-church-floor make-out sessions were surreptitious, illegal by American Youth Hostels standards. On the nights we camped out in tents, both her tent-mate and mine offered to do the old switcheroo to allow us a night of what would have been, to me, inconceivable pleasure. I have no idea whether Joanna was eager to accept or not, or whether she was disappointed by my inability to imagine her desire as equal to mine. I just know I was thrilled that the cute Jewish girl from Long Island found my scrawny, unkempt self sexy at all. A few secret wet kisses when no one was looking were more than I’d come to expect on that summer bike trip.
    I actually liked Joanna’s friend Tracy more than I liked her. Tracy’s the one who had been the object of my fantasies since we’d set off two weeks earlier. When she approached and asked if I liked Joanna (the eighth-grade method of being asked out on a date), I figured Tracy wasn’t interested. I felt lucky that at least one of them was, and, instead of saying, “Well, yeah, but I like you better,” I settled for what I could get. The first telling inaction in a life of romantic missteps.
    My first real girlfriend, my first sexual partner, was Noreen. We started dating when I was seventeen and just out of high school. Just to show that I don’t give up and leave relationships easily, Noreen started things off shortly after we started seeing each other by having sex with my older brother. Then she told me about it. I’m not endorsing this strategy, but I stayed with her for another year after that. Only when she told me that the two of them had done it again did I break things off with her. One relationship, one breakup. One for one. I’m not sure how, or on what grounds, you break up with your brother, though.

     
    It took a year or two before I’d recovered enough to try again.  I was nineteen and a student living in the East Village when I met Graciella. Graciella was twenty-five and an aspiring actress who earned her living as a waitress. It was with Graciella that I began my experimentation with repetitive breakups. We were together, off and on, for four years. When we finally split for good, after five or six false stops, I was twenty-three and an established off-Broadway actor. I even had a couple of Broadway and film credits to my name. Graciella was twenty-nine, and still a waitress. I suffered, and made her suffer, from an irresistible desire to co-exist with someone who felt more like a peer, coupled with a fear that no one else would ever love me as much as she did. As soon as I met someone who seemed as if she might, I dropped Graciella cold.
    I remember the final scene with her clearly. We’d already survived the dreadful “see a bit less of each other” episodes, and had even passed through the euphemistic “date other people” period. Still, after emotional rejection and sexual infidelity,