I just learned a couple of hours ago that the first man I was attracted to, and probably was in love with, died on July 7, 2017. J. P. Mullaney and I met in German class at East LA Junior College in the Spring of 1968. I moved in with him, briefly, before final exams in his studio apartment next to East LA College that semester. (We were watching TV together in that apartment the night Bobby Kennedy was murdered at the Ambassador Hotel in LA after he'd just won the California Democratic primary.) I remember we also stood in line with a couple hundred others to watch the premiere of THE GRADUATE in L.A.
The first night we slept together, several minutes after we got under the covers, he rolled over to wrap his right arm around me and I stopped him, thinking that he must be asleep and unaware of what he was doing. Perhaps I was not sure of myself, but I was also certainly naive. Nothing physical happened after that except a few times we wrestled on his convertible sofa before falling asleep next to one another. But the day he drove me to the airport that Summer of 1968, when I flew to Alaska to visit my cousin and his wife in Anchorage, we stood facing one another, barely a foot apart. He looked deep into my eyes before we left his apartment, smiled that particular wide grin of his and reached out, pulling me close and hugging me tightly. I was too surprised to know how to respond to that unexpected hug, especially in that era when men never hugged, and kept my arms at my side.
I was only 18--not confused really so much as tentative and a bit afraid. And when I saw the relationship that Doug and Sue had during the week I stayed with them, I knew that was something I wanted for myself. So when I returned to Southern California, I never called Jim again. He did call me once at the house on Cypress, but I was coolly distant on the phone, something I regret to this day. Perhaps I sensed that we were on two different paths or, more likely, I was not ready to be who I was going to become in the next two decades and more.
I read in his obituary that he had been happily married for 44 years to the same woman (his wife appears to have predeceased him). They had four children. He remained at the same job as a Federal attorney for 35 years, missing only one day of work in all those years, after graduating from Cal State LA.
He was described as a loving and incredible father and husband.
When I knew him, he worked as an orderly in a hospital while he was going to East LA and was dating a woman doctor at the hospital. I would remember him now and then during the intervening years and wondered where life had taken him after I ended our friendship. (I had certainly been unkind, but I had been given so many mixed messages during our six-month friendship that perhaps I was also protecting myself.)
He was 72 when he died, having been born in 1945. So, he was four years older than I and had already been in the Air Force before he came back from Vietnam and enrolled in college.
If he was genuinely happy living the life he pursued after we parted, I am glad to hear it. He was a good soul and I am very sorry to learn of his passing. He had a wonderful life but so, at long last, do I. His was a more direct path, it appears, while my life went through so many very painful twists and turns. In the words of poet Robert Frost,
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
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