My First lover

"My first lover

He was tall and breezy with his long hair down
But he gets a little hazy when I think of him now

My first lover
My first lover

He was always talking tryin to bring me down
But I was not waiting for a white wedding gown
From my first lover"

Gillian Welch, 2001

This song came out on Gillian Welch's album Time the Revelator in 2001. I thought I knew this album intimately. I once sat perched upon a cliff top at the end of a long dirt road in Big Sur listening to this album. As the sun went down, beers replaced dinner, the doors to the truck sat open, and my friend and I sang its praises. How then did I not understand this song until three years later when I saw Gillian Welch sing "My First Lover" at the strictly Hardly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. As her voice rang out through the overcast day and reached me huddled in my little grass spot among the crowd, I thought have I even heard this song before?

I met my first lover in 1987, when I was fourteen. My friend and I lied and said we were going to a double feature, but instead went to her boyfriend’s house. There I met P. He was perhaps the skinniest man I have ever known. In high school, his best friend followed him around for a week thinking he was a girl he had a crush on before they actually met. He had kinky black curly hair that stuck out in all directions, except when he ironed it to stick straight out to the sides in a style reminiscent of Robert Smith of the Cure (our then hero). His face was graced with giant chocolate brown eyes, a wide nose, and full, full lips. He didn’t talk a lot, and when he did, he often said strange things that came from a world he existed in somewhat on his own. I loved him. He was my lover for the ensuing six years.

The last time I saw him was about three years ago. He showed up at my house in Santa Cruz unexpectedly one Sunday afternoon when my mom was in town. He was living up in Oregon playing in a psychedelic jam band. I think he was living in a communal situation involving some gardening, but maybe I made that up. He had in tow a woman named Venus we had met at a dead show some 10 years before who had married a friend of ours- I got the sense that they were involved. They were on their way down to LA to pick up her kids from their grandma’s house. My mother, Venus, P., and I went for a walk on the beach. As Venus told my mother the story of the failed marriage and the two children, P. and I talked and didn’t talk about where we were at, where we had been, what we wanted. He could so much more easily talk and say what he was thinking than when i had known him before. At one point in my life I thought he was wasting how smart he was, but at that moment on the beach I respected his decisions and was just glad that we could connect after so many years. On the car ride back to my house, they started talking about how much money they had. It made me nervous that they were going to pick up two kids and tote them back up to Oregon with less than $100.00 between the two of them. Yet, in essence, he was himself. As I think about it now, I’m happy for him. He did not compromise who he was to make it. Can I say that? No. He is, for better or worse, unabashedly the person I took as my first lover eighteen years ago.