My first shave

I’ve been thinking about the old days. Really, I have never stopped thinking about the old days. Anything can prompt a trip through my memory drawer. A song not heard in some time can do it. So can a smell not recently smelled.

Often, shaving makes me think of my first shave. It was the summer of 1983, early August, and I was in Denver, Colorado. I was all of 17 years old. A few months before, in April, I had dropped out of High School and moved out of my parents house. Although I had not gone to court, I was effectively an “emancipated minor”, though that phrasing does seem a bit ironic.

As Janis Joplin sang, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I had spent June and July on the street in lower Manhattan, sleeping in abandoned buildings or on park benches and getting what little money I had each day from doing Tarot card readings on the sidewalk of 10th street, between First and Second Avenues. Then, in late July, I got a call from my best friend, Steve Hurley, who told me he was living in a tent on the side of a mountain outside of Boluder, Colorado with a bunch of hippies from the Rainbow Gathering. Steve asked me to come out and see him.

So, the next day, with five dollars, a pipe and a small ball of hashish in my pocket, I hitched a ride to Philadelphia, then to Chicago and, after an adventure in the Quad Cities of Iowa, on to Boulder. I arrived in Boulder with $1.50 to my name and my hash all used up. I remember going to a super market and buying a large box of raisins with all the money I had. I ate so many I got a stomach ache.

I made my way to the town commons and took out my sign, which read “Tarot Card readings: barter, trade or free”. By evening, I had enough money for a hamburger and some fries. While I was eating, Steve appeared, his red hair longer than I remembered and his irrepressible good nature on full display.

I was so happy to see Steve. We wandered about together as the twilight darkened into night. At some point, we wound up sitting on a bench by a parking lot and making out. As we were kissing, distracted, we were approached by three or four locals in Western-style clothing. They were clearly loud, belligerent and homophobic. We stood and faced them as they came into earshot. Both Steve and I were rather small and effete, while I remember each of them as large, red faced and hairy. I think their intent was to fag-bash us.

The biggest, meanest looking one, who was front and center, snarled “You two look like faggots!” Steve replied, without thinking, “Yeah, well you look like my mother!”

The rednecks (our word for them at the time) just froze. We saw confusion on each of their faces. I imagine they were tying to work out whether Steve had just insulted them, his mother, or both. In that moment, we ran, as fast and as far as we could and when we looked back they were gone.

We laughed and laughed and kissed some more. Then we headed to the edge of town, the road to Nederland, where we were able hitch a ride up the trailhead that lead to the Rainbow camp.

Weeks passed, magical, glorious weeks. I climbed mountains. We visited the Buddhist temples in Boulder. We spent hours hanging out with the rainbows. We were happy, but were also broke. It was difficult to make any significant money reading Tarot in Boulder, even more difficult for Steve to do so by panhandling.

One morning when the air was crisp and cold and hinted at the coming of fall and winter, Steve left camp before I got up and he did not return that night or the next. On the third day, when he did return, he had several hundred dollars and a new story to tell. Steve had gone into the city, to Denver, and there he had for the first time experimented with prostitution, selling blowjobs for twenty or forty dollars a pop at a sex arcade. Steve was happy, excited, even proud. The way he conceived his recent experience, he had recaptured the magic of the temple prostitutes from ancient Rome.

That was one of the things Steve and I shared, from the day we met to the day he died. We both experienced the world as magical, meaningful. Places and experiences that other people found scary or even distasteful we found to be elevating, enlightening, so long as we met them on the roads we had freely chosen to walk.

Steve’s story inspired me. The next morning, before Steve awoke, it was my turn to hitch a ride down the mountain and into Denver. Denver, in the Eighties, was not nearly as big of a city as New York was, but it was vastly larger than Boston, where I grew up. I wasn’t really sure where to find the sex store that Steve had visited. I didn’t really know anything at all about Denver.

Somehow I found myself outside the State Capitol and while standing there on the sidewalk, I was approached by two boys about my age. I soon learned that they were also homeless, that they were “hustlers”, which is what boys who engaged in gay prostitution called themselves in those days. I let them know that I was interested in learning to hustle and they, quite generously, gave me my first lesson.

After a month of camping, preceded by several more months of marginal living on the road, I was incredibly scruffy looking, with long stringy hair and a sparse and unkempt beard and mustache. The hustler boys sized me up quickly and informed me that I had every bit the looks for hustling, but that I would have to shave first. They took me to a drug store where I bought the cheapest Bic razor that money could buy and then to a public rest room in the Capitol building.

There was only one knob on this sink and the water that flowed from the taps was ice cold. I had no shaving creme, only some liquid hand soap, to lubricate my face. I also had no idea what I was doing. It took some time and more than a few small cuts and scratches to get my face clean.

When I was done, they took me back to the sidewalk just down the block from the Capitol building and told me to make eye contact with any drivers who slowed as they past. Within minutes, a man stopped and I was on my way to selling my first blowjob. I don’t really remember anything about the man who stopped. I do remember that after I was dropped back in the spot where the man picked me up, I was happy, both with having more than a few dollars for the first time in recent memory and for the experience, which was not distasteful to me.

A few moments later, I was approached by two young men, very handsome and sharply dressed. I could see that they were gay and that they were lovers before they spoke. I don’t what I expected, but I was certainly open to almost anything.

These young men chatted with me for a few moments, sizing me up both visually and verbally. Then, one of them invited me back to their home for a threesome. I had the twenty-five dollars from my first trick in my pocket, which to me was more than I needed, and I thought that both of them were incredibly cute, so I went with them.

Back at their apartment, they told me some more about themselves. They had been together for a few years and were still in love, but they were very open. I told them about my single experience as a street hustler, just before I met them. They responded that I was took good looking and too well spoken for the street. Then they offered me a most unusual proposition.

They said that if I agree to spend the night with them, doing drugs and submitting to them sexually, even violently, then they would introduce me to their friend, Tiny. Tiny was actually an enormous man, gay but deeply closeted. They told me that Tiny’s public reputation was as one of the top ranked bounty hunters in the country, but that he was also the secret proprietor of the most exclusive gay escort service in Denver and that if Tiny liked me I could easily earn $200 or more for a single trick.

It wasn’t just the money and it wasn’t just the drugs. I was genuinely intrigued by these boys, so in love and so kinky, by their story about Tiny and by the fact that I had encountered them while, by my own account, following my path, my spiritual path. Over the next five or six hours, I let them tie me up, urinate on me and in my mouth, perform every kind of sexual act upon me. Then, we showered and all slept together in their big bed.

In the morning, they took me to brunch and then to meet Tiny. Tiny and I took and immediate liking to each other. He invited me to stay in his home for as long as I wanted to. He promised I would be able to earn as much money as I wanted to while living with him.

Two weeks, and a lifetime of experience later, I had $2,000 saved up. Fall was now coming on quite quickly and I did not want to stay in Denver for the winter or, really, in any one place for too long. I had become friends with one of my customers, a man named Don who I continued to correspond with for the next twenty years. Over lunch one day, I told Don that I was ready to leave Denver and that I wanted to go to Los Angeles to see my beloved maternal grandmother, who was already in her nineties, before she died. Don, who worked as a tour guide in different parts of the country at different times of year, told me he was going to be driving to Los Angeles the following week , because he had been invited to appear as a contestant on Jeopardy, his favorite show. He offered to take me with him and I happily accepted.

We spent four or five days on the road, taking our time. We stopped off at a ski cottage that Don had in Vail, and again in Reno to play the slots. We listened to music by Boney-M. We talked a lot.

Years later, when another friend introduced me to the Gillette MACH3, which for many years remained the finest razor I had ever tried, it was something of a revelation. By that point I had grown past my wildest years. I had achieved many of the symbols of maturity in white America; first I got a job, then I became a parent, then, at 36 years old, I graduated from college. The shave I got from the MACH3, with hot water and shaving creme to boot, was almost unimaginably far removed from my first rough shave in the Colorado State Capitol building.

Earlier today, when I shaved with the even more wonderful Gillette Fusion 5 razor, I stopped a moment, remembering that first shave, 39 years and two thousand miles away. In truth, I stop and think about the same things every time I shave. At moments like that, there is a full range of emotions that arise along with the memories. Mostly, though, what I feel is lucky. I am lucky to have survived and I am also lucky to have experienced all of the things that happened to me. I still feel that the places I walked, with intention, with an open mind and heart that was truly young, even the terrible, scary and painful places, were the places I was meant to go. I am who I am because of who I was.

I still believe in magic.

I would not have it any other way. Thinking about my life, feeling about my life in this way is the only way I know to stay sane. It is the reason, after so much time and turmoil, that I can still laugh and I can still cry.