mallorys_camera | Back in the Days When I Was a Sociopath, I Met This Guy... (Warning: EXPLICIT Sexual Content)

Wow. Gary Goldberg died. Gary David Goldberg, I guess, since such was his professional monicker.

I knew Gary very well indeed back at U.C. Berkeley a billion years ago. He was this big, shambling laid-back guy and of all the people I knew at U.C. Berkeley where I was majoring in Economics and minoring in (urp) Dramatic Arts, the one I least would have predicted would make it big in Hollywood.

There were actually quite a few people from the U.C. Berkeley Dramatic Arts Department in the early 1970s who went on to make it big in Hollywood. I acted in a really bad comtemporization of Antigone, for example, with Harry Hamlin. Harry Hamlin was the most beautiful human male I had ever set eyes on. I mean, literally, you could not stop staring at him if you had any aesthetic appreciation for the human form at all. I wasn't friends with him exactly, but I do have vague memories of various midnight runs into Richmond to score illicit substances. What substances, I do not remember. Anyway, I was not at all surprised when Harry Hamlin made it big. He was too fucking beautiful not to.

Carl Franklin was also at Berkeley at that time. Another incredibly good-looking guy. We did the naughty once. He was incredibly nervous because he was living with a woman who was supporting him. I was surprised when he went on to become a director – he had "Actor" written all over him. I wouldn't have credited him with enough visual imagination to become a director although Devil In a Blue Dress is not bad. I wasn't surprised when he crashed and burned on the substance abuse reef, though. He was a really heavy drinker back in college. Smoked a lot of reefer too.

Another guy, Mark Something. A few minor production credits on some teen exploitation movies. Decided he wanted to become a doktah! Fixed me up with a roommate for the 51st Street dive over the International Driving School who turned out to be Burt Lancaster's daughter Susan and who moved straight out after I discovered she was Burt Lancaster's daughter Susan.

But Gary Goldberg. Wow, wow, and wow. I almost broke up his relationship with the woman he eventually married. Good thing I didn't, actually. I think Diana's stability was probably the key to his success.

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There's a memoir I'm really fond of called Minor Characters. It's written by a woman named Joyce Johnson who was one of Jack Kerouac's throwaway girlfriends. It details her frustrations with being a footnote. The book either begins or ends with this extraordinary line: If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.”

I feel like that so often.

Gary and I were directing a play together – the Nightown sequence from Ulysses, a novel I read with much difficulty and little comprehension: I have what you might call a magpie intelligence; I balk at heavy lifting.

Anyway, Gary and I soon drifted into a physical affair. If I close my eyes, I can actually feel the shape of his shoulders, the hollows of his scapula, and the movements of his cock – he liked to take his time as a lover; had that circular, side-to-side movement, which has always worked best for me for vaginal orgasms and is – I have to say – very different from the way most circumcised guys fuck. He was a very gentle, considerate lover and afterwards would lie in my arms, overcome with grief and guilt.

"But she gave up everything for me," he would say. She was Diana.

"So?"

"You don't understand. She was in a convent in New Mexico. She was going to become a nun –"

"A nun?"

"Yes. And she fell in love with me and she left without a backwards glance –"

"So?"

Love and loyalty were not high on my list in those days. Don't hate me: I was raised to be a sociopath and I have struggled hard to shed my wooden puppet body and become a real human boy -- er, girl.

I'm not sure if Gary ever seriously contemplated leaving Diana for me. I wasn't in love with him, although I liked him well enough. When we weren't fucking, we spent a lot of time playing Frisbee with his dog Ubu, a black lab mix whom Gary had named after the eponymous hero of the Jarry play to establish his surrealist absurdism street cred.

Also at U.C. Berkeley at this time was a comparative literature professor named E. Kerrigan Prescott. E. Kerrigan was a raging sex addict. His beautiful GiGi-esque wife Karen – who later (no, I'm not kidding here) ran off with Grandpa Munster – acted as his procurer, staging elaborate orgies at their tony house in the Berkeley Hills. I went to a number. What I remember most about them was their rather grim, oppressive, rampant heterosexuality. As a woman, you could fuck and suck males to their hearts' content, but God forbid that you put a hand on another woman's breast.

Kerry and I had a rather complicated history as well – too long to go into now – but I'll always be grateful to him for turning me on to Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness and for taking the time to explain the meaning of the word "ontogeny" to me. As a lover, though, he was the pits – absolutely grim and joyless.

I was rapidly running out of money, which meant it was time to go back to NYC again and shake the money tree. Gary and I drifted apart as unmemorably as we had drifted together. A few nights before I left, Kerry was staging another one of his orgies so I went. And whatdiya know. Gary was there too. With Diana.

Of course, I knew Diana. In those days, you could fuck somebody's boyfriend and if they were uptight about it, tough shit. You could still go to their house, hang out, smoke dope, argue philosophy, expect to be fed.

Diana was a small, tightly wound Irish-looking girl. Dark-haired and I want to say blue-eyed but actually I can't remember. I do remember her nose. Upturned. I as jealous of her nose. Also, she was very smart. Much smarter than Gary.

Anyway, at the orgy, Diana made a beeline toward me and then proceeded to break the heterosexuality code in various and sundry ways that were not particularly pleasurable. It was obviously not something she was doing for her own pleasure either. There was a kind of fury to it.

Jump cut several years, and I am back in Berkeley, riding my bicycle down pleasant, tree-lined Benvenue Street. I was just back from Egypt. A voice calls my name. Gary.

I was not thrilled to see him.

"So, we're running a daycare," said Gary.

Right, I thought. Loser, I thought.

"We had a baby. Shawna."

What an incredibly stupid name, I thought.

"You know, when the unemployment ran out, we went to Israel. I got a job as a character on an Israeli TV show for kids, Captain Smarty Pants!" I don't know if that was actually the character's name. I don't remember the character's name now. "Then I moved into production. Now, we're back here doing this."

I beamed beautifically at him, plotting my escape.

And a few years he was producing the number one sit com on network TV.

The world moves in mysterious ways. But eventually everything becomes just one more handful of dust.

RIP, Gary. You were a genuinely nice guy.