Uncomfortable Hours

"Be good," I said, more out of habit than anything else.

"I can't," she replied. "I'm not a good person."

That was the day Sara gathered her belongings from my house and ended our Relationship (with a capital "R").

But it was only the end, in a sense.

On July 7^th, 1989, my friend Jake and his girlfriend Kim had dinner with Sara and I at the Harvest, a restaurant in Queensbury, New York. Jake and Kim, whom I had introduced to each other, had been dating for about two weeks. Kim and Sara worked together, and Jake and Kim were trying to set me up with Sara as thanks, I guess, for introducing them.

Jake and Kim had had sex early the next morning after the night they met; they had stayed up all night talking, then banged their way into the dawn. Kim decided to repay the favour I had done by introducing me to her co-worker at Sterling optical, Sara. After all, Jake was the only man who had ever "touched bottom" with Kim, so she had a large debt to repay, and wanted to find me a suitable mate.

Instead, she introduced me to Sara.

Dinner at the Harvest didn't go terribly well. Others present that night later told me differently, that they had enjoyed themselves, but I was miserable. It wasn't Sara--I was just churlish and bitter throughout the entire evening.

I was coming off of two failed relationships, one with a girl named Denise, who I thought I really loved, and one with a co-worker's roommate. That one never even really got off the ground.

Kim and Sara weren't really friends, but as I say, they worked together at Sterling Optical in the Clifton Country Mall in Clifton Park. There was a picnic coming up for the Sterling staff at the Spa State Park in Saratoga Springs, and Sara needed a date. Kim, Jake's girlfriend, decided it must be fate, and set out to introduce us. Sometime later I learned that Kim didn't even know Sara's last name at the time. Clearly a lot of thought went into the matchmaking process.

The Sunday of the picnic, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to go until mere hours before the scheduled 6 AM meeting time. I decided that, at one point, I had nothing to lose by just not showing up. Sara and I had only met once, and her feelings were of little or no consequence to me.

However, around 3:30 in the morning, Don Racette showed up to relieve me at the radio station (I was doing overnights at WWSC in Glens Falls at the time), as I had asked him to come in early so I could leave for the picnic. I decided to go, and went home to grab a quick shower before heading over to Kim's apartment in the Annandale Mansion, where we were set to meet at 6.

Now, you might think 6 AM is a little early to meet for a picnic. God knows I did, but since I was getting out of work about that time anyway, I didn't say anything about it.

It rained on us, there in the early uncomfortable hours of my relationship with Sara. Needing some items at the store, Sara and I hiked back to my car from the picnic spot in the park, and drove to Price Chopper to get our supplies.

Back at the park, we basically sat around in the rain until around 11 AM, when the sun started to come out and food started being prepared. Sara and I lay on the ground looking at clouds and playing mental games--I remember one where we each tried to name one rock band for each letter of the alphabet. Would that those were the only mental games we ever played together.

The Monday after the picnic, Sara and I went to dinner, such as it was, at the Clifton Park Wendy's. We got to know each other a bit better, and I was hopeful about us being able to make a go of some sort of relationship. I had become attracted to her sense of fun while we were looking up at the sky that day at the park, and wanted to get closer to her.

After we ate at Wendy's, we drove around Clifton Park for a while, and talked a lot. When we got back to the lot where Sara's car was parked, there was an awkward moment where I was perhaps talking too much while my car was running, and Sara shut off my engine and began kissing me in one smooth motion.

Kissing Sara was…fun. She was fun, in those early days of knowing her. It was a refreshing change from my relationship with Denise, which had at times been so serious I felt like I was at a funeral. Even when we were kissing!

After we made out at the mall parking lot that night, it was clear to both Sara and I that we were heading into a relationship. I picked her up after work the next night, and things, physically, progressed rapidly at that point.

On the 16^th of that month, Sara came up to the radio station for the first time and kept me company during my radio show. She had to leave at 4 AM because she had a second job at McDonald's and she was opening that morning. During the night, we had talked about our thoughts on relationships, and she told me she didn't want to fall in love again. It was pretty much the same speech I had heard from my co-worker's roommate just a couple of weeks earlier.

For the next couple of weeks, I pursued Sara vigorously; we saw each other constantly, with Sara coming up to visit me at the station, and me picking her up after work nearly every night. She stayed at my house for over a week during an extended fight with her family. One night she showed up unexpectedly at WWSC, crying and asking me to hold her. We talked through the night, and seeing her vulnerable and wounded like that just increased my attraction to her.

After that night, she stayed at my house, but little was happening sexually. We had not consummated our relationship, although we had gotten pretty close a couple of times. Sleeping next to her in bed was maddening.

I came to like having her in my house, though--her belongings were strewn about, just like at her house, and that served as a reminder that I was taking part in a Mature Adult Relationship.

On July 22^nd, she did the nicest thing for me that anyone had ever done. She bought me flowers. Then, while watching Die Hard and eating pizza at Kim's apartment, I diddled her under a blanket for hours, with Kim (apparently) having no idea what we were doing.

When we got back to my house, we both wanted to have sex. And we started to, but she began weeping, and that was that, give or take some mutual licking. The evening had begun on a hopeful note, with the flowers she gave me, but by the time those flowers were dead, so was my Mature Adult Relationship.

In the midst of this, Andrea Reuss died.

I had worked with Andrea at WKAJ in Saratoga Springs. She was the receptionist under the disastrous Ginsberg Regime, and was stunningly beautiful. She and her husband were killed when the DC-10 they were travelling on crashed over Sioux City, Iowa.

Despite the fact that we barely knew each other, I took Andrea's death very badly. It was my first real encounter with death, and I was numb from it for some time. Sara comforted me as best she could, and was with me the day I picked up the newspaper and discovered Andrea and her husband had been killed. The photo of the two of them that the paper printed that day is burned forever in my mind.

Denise, the girl I thought I loved and had lost some months earlier, had reentered my life and we were now talking on the phone all night long during my show every night. I was feeling torn between her and Sara, and I wrote about it with authority in my journal on July 22^nd:

"I don't know what to do."

On August 3^rd, Sara made up my mind for me; she packed her stuff and left.

She had begun seeing someone else, a Navy guy named Dave who she had been dating before we met. Presumably Dave was the reason she hadn't wanted to fall in love with me. Denise now began seeing someone else as well, the same day Sara left me. I've said it before, but irony seems to be the thread that holds together the fabric of my life. I went from too many choices to absolutely none in less than 24 hours.

About two weeks later, Dave walked out on Sara, and we began seeing each other again, this time in a lower-case "r" relationship; neither one of us ever discussed at this point the possibility that this was actually going to go anywhere. It was an act of weakness on her part to begin seeing me again, and on my part to consent to letting her back in my life. She had royally fucked me over with the Dave thing, and I should have let it all go right there.

But my fear of being alone was stronger than my pride and good sense, and so we began again.

At the end of August, more friends than lovers, Sara and I embarked on a trip to Syracuse to attend the New York State Fair.

Here's part of a letter I wrote to Todd Steed about the trip:

"We split the cost of the motel room. We watch Carson, who has Letterman on as a guest, and then shut out the lights. We chat for a while, and I bring up the fact that Sara has been avoiding physical contact of most kinds for some time now. I assure her that if she kisses me, I'm not going to think there is marriage in our future, or even a future in our future. She says she's sleepy, and I make it clear I'm horny. She says go to sleep, I shut up…she starts playing with my hair after a bit, and I kiss her. Stuff happens.

"After which, please note, she asks me to hold her and begins crying uncontrollably. Spoils the moment, but for some reason I do care about her, so I hold her and try to make it all right, which doesn't really work.

"Eventually, she goes to sleep. I go for a grape soda from the machine out in the hall, and try to deal with life."

She refused to discuss what had happened the night before on the drive back home the next day, and we saw each other less and less as the weeks wore on.

The last time we got together was for lunch one day at the Pizza Hut on Route 9 in Latham. I had something serious to tell her, and wanted to do it on neutral ground.

See, despite the fact that our lower-case "r" relationship was dying a slow, painful death, I felt I owed it to her to be honest and let her know I had met someone else.

She cried as I told her I couldn't see her anymore because I had begun seeing a 14-year old girl named Leslie.

Copyright © 1989 by Alan David Doane