Talking Heads

One night, Chris and I volunteered to help out at a dance in the cafeteria, and we ended up back in my room, slightly drunk and sweaty from the activities. We were sitting on the bed talking and she suddenly kissed me. Just like that. I was shocked and delighted, and we fell back onto the bed and gently made out for a few minutes before drifting off to sleep in each other’s arms.

When I awoke, I was alone, but nervously ecstatic. We had finally both acknowledged our attraction and, for better or worse, had crossed over into a new frontier. I showered and ate breakfast and reported to the audio/visual equipment office, where I worked a few hours a week checking cameras and PAs and the like into and out of the office. Halfway through my shift, Chris showed up to say hi. I was buzzing with excitement as she came up to the counter and I grinned conspiratorially at her. She smiled back, somewhat puzzled, and said something to the effect of, “boy, I got so drunk last night, I don’t remember a thing that happened after we left the dance”. I was flabbergasted and crushed. I couldn’t believe she would stoop to such an obviously clichéd position. Either she was lying, which was so out of what I thought her character was that I’d have to severely re-evaluate our relationship, or she wasn’t lying and this remarkable, exciting, glorious moment meant so little to her that she couldn’t even remember it eight hours later. Either way, I was devastated. Speechless, I motioned that I had to get back to work, and helped the next person in line check in their video camera outfit, watching her wander uncertainly back into the library.

Later, she caught up with me and apologized. She said she hadn’t remembered, but when she saw me and, more importantly, smelled me, she knew something had changed, and it came back to her as she wandered, confused, back through the library. I warily accepted her apology, and later that night, we tried kissing again, this time completely sober. This time, she remembered it in the morning.

Things progressed quickly. Well, no they didn’t. On our time table, which was more like the days of courting from the 18th century than anything anybody was doing after the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and the hedonistic disco age of the ‘70s, things progressed quickly. Chris was patient and understanding and willing to talk things through and listen even when I had nothing to say and help me try to understand why I had so much trouble expressing my desire physically. We talked about past failures and upsetting moments and experiments that had gone horribly awry. Because we had built up such a strong bond over such a long period of months, our friendship wasn’t shattered when I couldn’t respond and, eventually, I found that I could. It was a slow and scary road, but ultimately, with her loving patience and encouragement, at the ripe old age of 23, I was able to leap over the last barrier and officially removed the stigma of virginity.

As usual, there was lots of music that I was listening to at the time, but Naked was at the top of the list, and it became one of our records – especially the song Totally Nude. We were both rejoicing that we had found someone we could be comfortable with while being totally nude, and it became our theme song that spring and into the summer. We moved in together after graduation and haven’t been apart since. And that’s why, more than the paranoia of Psycho Killer or the wary funk of Life During Wartime or the world-fusion of Once in a Lifetime, the gleeful, career-ending joy of being Totally Nude will always be the quintessential Talking Heads song to me.

Through Chris’ patience and insight, I was able to begin to understand my sexuality better. Although I am enthusiastically heterosexual, and my equipment is clearly of the plug-and-play variety, my sexuality is more feminine than stereotypically masculine. Romance was more important to me than sex, and one of the reasons I had close female friends was that I could relate to them in a way that was not sexually threatening. Even horny as hell, I was careful never to objectify women, and could easily open up a space of tenderness and respect between us. I wanted sex, sure, but I wanted love even more, and that made me fairly unusual among adolescent boys. Girls could let their guard down with me in a way that they couldn’t with a lot of other guys.