Summer of 1994, Boston, Massachusetts

By S.A. Miller

It was the summer of my 29th year. Three months ticking down to 30. I had just ducked out of a five-year engagement to a kind banker, thereby avoiding a future in the suburbs, a black BMW and, inevitably, seven-year, or sooner, itchiness. Friends, mutely high on healthy retirement funds, worried over me, asked what I was doing quitting my fancy job and relationship with Perfect Guy. Here’s what I didn’t tell them.

I was in recovery from responsible. From a life that appeared so right on paper that no one, least of all me, looked up to notice that my soul had nearly vaporized. I wanted my soul back. I wanted to stunt my grown-up.

I found a dark studio sublet on the edge of seedy in Boston’s South End. For $1 I bought a rusty orange Toyota with a broken muffler, as if needing to be loud. That summer, I got stoned a lot, took a much younger lover, ate decadently, and read dozens of novels. I spent the time backpedaling from adulthood. It was a summer of pure and unapologetic insouciance.

By day (if I even woke up) I wrote confessional stories for women’s magazines and pornographic fiction for Larry Flynt publications. By night … ah, by night. Well, there was Chad, my rail-thin, blond lover 10 years my junior, who stunned me with the solidness of his passion. We didn’t go out on dates. No point. We spent our time on that all-night-into-morning, black-coffee-in-bed, one-more-round-before-you-go brand of lovemaking that I needed like a lifer in a prison craves touch.

Boston sweltered that summer, and I only had a lazy ceiling fan to stir the heat of that small room. I could lie in bed and smell summer in the city — street tar and Thai basil plants that I’d set outside my window on the fire escape. At night Chad would press me onto the cotton sheets, sometimes hold an ice cube in his mouth. Sade’s Love Deluxe on continual loop, he would wind that ice cube down my body until it melted in a trail of prickly cold against hot skin.

Afterwards, one of us would pull on clothes and stagger across the street to the Middle Eastern market for Popsicles and, sometimes, little packets of Sominex because Chad had to work the next day and who could sleep in that heat. So when he would finally doze off, I’d curl up on the couch and lose myself in romantic movies that I hadn’t been able to watch for five years. Movies that had always left me too unbearably empty and aching for love.

On Sundays, I’d often go around the corner to the famed Wally’s Café, where wrinkled old black guys who once played with the likes of Charlie Parker would jam with long-haired white boys from the Berklee College of Music just down Mass Ave. Sometimes men off the street who didn’t have much more than a bag of clothes, their saxophone and some really good stories would sit in on a set. I’d bring my newspaper and journal. I’d get a rickety table in the corner and nurse a beer through the afternoon while big-voiced, beautiful black women sang their hearts out. Eyes closed, arms lifted, they looked like chubby angels singing to the heavens.

Food was another indulgence. As a vegetarian I had always looked after myself with whole grains, abundant fruits, and vegetables. But that summer, it was just too hot to cook. Or maybe that was my excuse. I’d cooked for five years. I was tired of it.

So I ate out all the time. When I wanted. If I felt like it. I had no regular mealtimes. Sometimes, I’d go a day on lattés and dark chocolate, then late in the evening, when a story was done, I’d call my writer friend Mary and we’d stroll through the South End, often ending up at Delux Café, where we’d eat pizza, drink salt-rimmed margaritas, and play Scrabble until we were slouched across the bar, half asleep but still bickering over the spelling of some word that one of us had maybe concocted.

(I still remember a near brawl over “egotism.” I said there was no “t”, that the word was egoism. She insisted on the “t.” We were both right. Egoism and egotism. If I learned anything useful that summer, it’s that two writers should never play Scrabble without a dictionary.)

Sometimes I’d get my neighbor Paul, a handsome gay man who worked at home, and drive us just 20 minutes away to Walden Pond in Concord. There we’d waste the afternoon with a joint and our books.

We’d stay until the park closed at 8 p.m., hiding behind trees in the depths of Thoreau’s woods until the guard who cased the pond had passed us, deeming the park empty. When it was as quiet and dark as No Man’s Land, we’d swim naked in the cool, deep pond, the only true respite we could find from that clinging heat.

Once we swam the entire width, laughing so hard we almost drowned midway. We got to the other side without our clothes and with the clear understanding that we absolutely would not survive the swim back. So, naked, we circled back on foot through the woods, mosquitoes feasting on us as we slapped our bodies and howled into the darkness with frenzied joy.

I needed that summer like a drug. It brought my body back to life, resuscitated my soul. But when I would stop to consider what I was (or perhaps wasn’t) doing, I’d have to dodge old lingering Catholic feelings of shame. That whole summer felt like something I needed to confess. I would try to write in my journal, but the details on paper looked like lurid fiction that I could hardly recognize as pieces of my own existence.

Was that really my life? When in 29 years had I lived so sensuously and decadently by absolutely no one else’s rules but my own? It felt terrible. It felt wonderful. It felt foreign.

Toward summer’s end, I was fearful about how I would walk away from it, this deliciously licentious lifestyle, before becoming addicted like some washed-up rocker who still gets drunk in hotel rooms and smashes lamps. But then something happened.

Through a coincidental conversation in a bar one night, I met someone who knew my college boyfriend, perhaps the one man I had ever truly loved. The one I had drifted from 10 years earlier, but only through physical distance. In our heads, we both always wondered and, in our separate worlds, wandered back to our romance as passionately charged as so many of my recent summer nights. And now we were both in Boston. Both recently single.

We reconnected on the phone and planned a date. When he picked me up in my South End sublet that Friday night, I took one look at him and felt ready to be a grown-up again. A different kind than I’d been before the summer, but still, he helped ease me out of irresponsible.

So with August fading to autumn, and feeling sated on self-indulgence, I told Chad good-bye, relinquished my sublet, and stepped around the corner to 30.

S.A. Miller did, in fact, grow up and marry that guy. They bought a house, but not quite in the suburbs, where they are raising their two magically mad children. Sometimes the author still swims naked at Walden Pond.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 | Email This Post

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