Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (xvi)

Rosemary was about my age, used less plastic-looking make-up and lipstick than Pat, and looked more like the kind of women college students and young Movement women in their 20s that I was usually most physically attracted to at that time than did the 38-year-old Pat. So after Rosemary kissed me at the Christmas party in the Writers Guild office, I, initially, felt her kiss would be the most memorable one I received from that 9 to-5 work scene in December 1970.

But when I surprised Sylvia by traveling all the way from the Bronx by subway down to Brooklyn to attend a late Saturday afternoon-evening Christmas party she was having at her apartment for both her friends and those Writers Guild office workmates who wished to attend, I was, in turn, surprised.

After speaking briefly to an older, late fortyish African-American male friend of Sylvia at her apartment party—who advised me that the secret of having a good time at dull parties where you might not know anybody else or have anything in common with the other guests was to “just blend in”—I had a few drinks and pretty much just waited until I could find some way to make my escape from Sylvia’s party in a graceful way.

Pat was the only other Writers Guild office worker, besides Sylvia and me, at the party. But she was busy spending most of her time at the party drinking heavily and flirting with a macho older straight Latino man in his early 40s, who seemed heavily on the make and seemed to be pushing Pat to spend the night with him after the party.

This macho, culturally straight older guy who was trying to pick up Pat, however, had a car. So when the now drunk Pat was ready to leave, he generously offered to drive Pat, a younger African-American male cousin of Sylvia in his mid-twenties, and me back into Manhattan; and he offered to drop me and Sylvia’s younger cousin off at a Manhattan subway station, before driving the drunken Pat back to her apartment on the Upper East Side.

So, after the older macho guy, Pat, Sylvia’s cousin and I left Sylvia’s party together, I somehow found myself sitting next to the now very drunk Pat in the back seat of the older macho guy’s car, while he was in the front seat driving and now conversing with Sylvia’s younger cousin, who was sitting in the front passenger seat next to him. And by the time the car, after being driven down Flatbush Avenue , had reached one of the bridges going into Manhattan, I was surprised to feel Pat, not only leaning against me in the back seat, but suddenly start to wrap her arms around me, press her large breasts against me and passionately give me a long erotic kiss with her lips.

Before Pat approached me in such a sexually arousing way in the back seat when she was drunk, I hadn’t really ever considered the possibility that Pat might be interested in having an out-of-office love affair with me, since she was approaching 40 and I was just in my early 20s. In the early 1970s, it still was considered unusual for a hip man in his early 20s to think of getting involved sexually with a woman in her late 30s, whose son was a teenager and who used make-up and lipstick-- instead of just having love affairs with the sexually emancipated hip women in their 20s of his own generation, who didn’t use make-up and lipstick, didn’t have children and were still resisting being permanently trapped at some 9-to-5 straight world job.

But while Pat’s lips were touching mine and she began pressing her breasts against me, I suddenly realized that Pat was as able to quickly turn me on sexually as much as were the younger women of my own generation.

Yet because of our age difference, I still felt reluctant in the back seat to get involved in a love affair with Pat. So I gently pushed her away, while whispering: “You must really be drunk, Pat.”

Pat then pointed to the older, culturally and politically straight, unhip, macho man in the front seat who was driving and, in a soft drunken voice, whispered back to me: “You’re so different than a man like that. You’re a new kind of man. That’s why I love you.”

I was touched a little by what the lonely Pat said while she was drunk. But again I just whispered: “I guess we all had too much to drink at Sylvia’s.”

Not long afterwards, the car reached a Downtown Manhattan subway stop on the other side of the bridge it had driven over from Brooklyn, and Sylvia’s younger cousin and I were dropped off and each got out of the car. The older macho man in his 40s then drove his car uptown toward the Upper East Side to drop off Pat, who was now half-asleep in the back seat, at her Upper East Side apartment.

By the following Monday, however, most of Sylvia’s Saturday night Christmas party was already forgotten. But in the Writers Guild office on Monday morning the now sober Pat whispered to me: “Hope you didn’t mind me getting so drunk the other night.”

“No. I didn’t mind,” I replied.

In retrospect, I probably should have asked Pat if she wanted to go out on a date with me, when we were both sober, some evening after work or on the next Saturday night. But because Pat had a teenage son and because of our age difference, I still felt ambivalent about attempting to get involved romantically with Pat at that time.

Because an older woman like Pat was probably more sexually experienced in early 1971 than were most of the women of around my own age at that time that I was likely to be involved with, it’s possible that we both would have found a love affair between us at that time sexually exciting, if I hadn’t closed myself off emotionally to that possibility. But, in retrospect, I’m still not sure that the excitement of making love to each other in the early 1970s would have been enough to overcome whatever relationship difficulties the difference in age and generational/cultural values might have created between us, if we had attempted to date each other or hang out with each other in a public way over a long period of time--given the way many people USA at that time tended to put down older women who became sexually involved with men who were over 15 years younger and the younger men who became involved with such older women.

So as 1970 turned into 1971 on January 1, 1971, I was not involved romantically with anyone either at the Writers Guild Office or anyone outside of my office-boy work scene. And, politically, I was pretty much waiting for revolutionary feminist Movement women to rapidly make the Revolution in the United States by non-violently occupying the U.S. mass media conglomerate’s television network studios in Manhattan in April of 1971--in the same way that anti-war students at Columbia had non-violently occupied Columbia’s campus buildings in April of 1968.