Rarely Laughed that much…

After the movie we went to her place and made love, and then it was over.

That was with Adelheid back then. “Come on,” she said, “there’s a crazy funny movie playing that you absolutely have to see,” and she dragged me into the Nuart, one of those run-down revival halls in West Los Angeles where you could hang out throughout the entire night, just with one ticket.

I can’t remember individual scenes, but I know that flamboyant clowns hopped around grotesquely, hysterical wenches screamed shrill cries, and colorful mythical creatures haunted the screen in bizarre contortions. We doubled over with laughter until it started to really hurt, and tears ran down our cheeks. I tried to distract myself and think of cold corpses and disgusting worms, but it didn’t help. Every time we looked at each other, a new wave of laughter overwhelmed us until we fell into blissful and at the same time painful waves of laughter that escalated into wild fits, all that without any drugs. As the performance drew to a close, we could no longer stay in our seats, rolled out into the aisle and tumbled around on the floor, rolling over each other with laughter, while the well-behaved adult people walked around us in sparkling spirits and stumbled out of the cinema with cheerful smiles on their faces.

Of course, it wasn’t really the movie that triggered this ecstasy, it was Adelheid, her provocative manner, her delightful presence. Her laughter was simply irresistible and contagious, just as everything about her was irresistible and contagious. And it was the distorted echo of our crazy passion, it was our exhilaration about having found each other again, and it was the angst of whether and how things would continue between us. It was all that and much more, all the tension that had built up and now had to burst out after so many months of separation.

Yes, I was madly in love with her and wanted her desperately. No doubt, she was one of a kind: young and slender, fresh from the German province dropped abruptly into Hollywood, seemingly an innocent girl from the countryside, but then again so uniquely funny and sizzling that she could have evolved from the Berlin club scene. In a way I liked everything about her, her childlike, milky skin dotted with a few freckles, her slightly snappy and suggestive manner when I got too close to her, her suspicious eyes with which she examined me mockingly when I stood up to her, her snub nose, which she stretched toward the sky, but not out of arrogance, rather as if to say, “Come on, try a bit harder, I do want you, but you have to show me that you’re a special man, so get going.”

She was the prettiest of the whole clique that hung out in the cafés on Melrose Avenue. With blue eyes and blonde, curly hair, she wasn’t really my type; I liked more exotic women, but her cheeky nature simply knocked me out.

For North Americans, of course, with her light hair, creamy skin, and fresh, carefree manner, she was the most desirable woman around, and the men were after her like, well, like a bitch in heat. Only she was not in heat, and that was the problem. Not entirely inexperienced, she always acted as if she didn’t really understand what the male crowd actually wanted from her. With an innocent expression, she would look around the circle as if she found the whole erotic chase ritual completely incomprehensible. It was precisely this naive, girlish pose that drove her admirers to despair, including me.

But it so happened that we broke away from the clique more and more often and found ourselves alone together, strolling down Sunset Boulevard and hanging out in street cafes during the day. At night, we besieged the rough rock bands at Doug Weston’s Troubadour in West Hollywood, and we had a blast belting out songs in all keys, screaming, bawling and hopping around euphorically, all out of sheer alegría de vida, without a drop of alcohol. The drinks bored us, and we didn’t have money anyway.

She also began to make comments that I interpreted as admiration. I was a bit cocky back then, and she seemed to like that. One time she told me that I had a sweeping, masculine walk, or another time she applauded when I popped the corks out of wine bottles at parties the way I had learnt it in my sailor days. She also confessed to me that she usually didn’t feel feminine at all, rather prickly and spiky with no desire to be feminine. That’s when I comforted her and told her that I would like to wrestle with her, just for fun, and promised her, still half-jokingly but now with a serious undertone, that I would make her a woman if she just wanted me to.

She listened in a good-humored way and laughed cheerfully from time to time, but for a long time nothing much happened except warm hugs when we greeted each other and a few awkward kisses on the cheeks. After all we became good friends before we made love.

Most of the time she was just really friendly like a good companion, but whenever I made more serious moves, she backed off. I sensed that sometimes doubts lingered in her mind as to whether she could trust this guy at all. I remember spending hours together in a café on the corner of Doheny and Santa Monica Boulevard, looking into each other’s eyes, totally open and candid, two uprooted creatures on the asphalt slab of Los Angeles, two abandoned souls in search of their lost happiness.

These were intense exchanges exploring each other with our eyes only and few or no words, while her mood constantly changed, loving and trusting, questioning and suspicious, confused and helpless, flirtatious and playful, and sometimes, when my eyes plunged deep into hers and I recognized a hurt animal from times long past beyond the surface, she became deadly serious. That was the worst. Then she would startle, pull herself together. This was always the moment when she broke away from the intimate fusion of our gazes, acted as if nothing had happened and started making small talk, while I struggled, overwhelmed with my intense emotions.

But one day, when I was lying in bed after an accident, she showed up unexpectedly in my room in our commune on Keith Avenue. That was a nice gesture, really. There she sat on a chair at a respectful distance in the middle of the room, seemingly unaware of how she had landed there or what to do with herself. We exchanged a few pleasantries, but through her embarrassment, I could already sense what had driven her to me. With the rested mood of a convalescent and the exuberant self-confidence of a desirable man, I said, “why don’t you come closer,” and stretched out my hand, but she said, “Nah, I’d rather not.” I didn’t let that confuse me, knowing that deep down she wanted to be held, and just felt a bit awkward, more like a clumsy girl, an untamed, feral kitten. A Wildfang who prefers to move around and play and doesn’t really want to get drawn into weird erotic stuff.  “Come on, let me pet you,” I said, “I won’t bite.” We both laughed, and I looked into her eyes, and her cheekiness began to melt away, revealing the soft face of a vulnerable child. Then she came closer, tentatively, with mixed feelings, like a love-hungry, distrustful cat. I stroked her hair and told her what a sweet girl she was, and she started trusting me.

I pulled her onto the bed and we wrestled playfully. Oh, I knew quite well that she only could be reached in a frolicking way.  The teasing turned into gentle, curious touches until we were snuggled up close together. I kissed her neck and her mouth, and she let me caress her everywhere. After a while, I slid my hand under her panties and was surprised at how quickly she began to moan, slightly at first, then deeper from her gut. I could already feel her becoming soft and wet, melting in my arms. Then I knew that she yearned to be loved, When I came into her, she wrapped herself around me with unexpected passion, clinging to me almost desperately.

Later, we lay lovingly entwined in bed, and when I confessed how much I liked her, she began to cry. She spoke of her father, a butcher with sausage-like fingers, who always smelled so disgusting and never had a kind word for her, and sometimes flew into a rage and hit her. And she spoke of the ghosts of the past that haunted her, so that all men frightened her.

Her crying didn’t bother me, but I pushed it away. And her lamentations were more lulling than annoying, like the distant sound of the sea, not particularly significant. What mattered to me was that she had acquired a taste for love, and I told her she was now my girlfriend.

In the first days of spring, we went hiking and camping together in the wilderness of the Angeles Forest. I took pictures of her, naked, in all kinds of poses, which she was happy to do. But she said her breasts were too small, smaller than Beate’s from the clique, and why wasn’t I with her, and I said, “Yes, but she’s not as cheeky as you,” and I pulled her close to me and we laughed. When dusk fell and it got cool, I dragged whole tree trunks over and we made a campfire between the rocks, and then we made love and slept, and it was heavenly, like being in the womb.

A week later, however, I set off to visit my Mexican relatives in Guadalajara, which had been planned for months. I couldn’t cancel the trip just because she had been lying in my arms and was such a nice girl and all that. I couldn’t take her with me either, because my girl-friend Loli from Andalusia was coming with a number of her friends. I figured that when I came back, she would still be a nice girl.

The trip happened to drag on, and we vagabonded with the whole group through the rainforests of Chiapas and the guerrilla-infested jungles of Guatemala, and I didn’t come back until three months later. Adelheid was still there, but she had a new boyfriend, a lanky guy whose pants legs were always too short and who was dabbling in real estate. Yes, really, he didn’t harmonize with her at all, and I realized right away that it wasn’t working out between the two. I told myself that she needed me.

That was the day she dragged me to the movies almost without saying a word, as if we had nothing to talk about, but then we laughed ourselves to death. On that first evening after my return, we lay in bed in her apartment and she cried again and said that she felt betrayed because of my trip to Mexico and that I had run away to sleep with another woman there. I didn’t know what to make of it, said, “But I’m here now, isn’t that what matters?” and “Where is the problem?” and brushed it all off. It was only years later that I understood what she had been talking about.

We had ended up in bed on a trial basis to find out if we still knew and liked each other, just as everything between us happened on a trial basis. It was also very beautiful, she was really tender and covered my body with little soft kisses, yes, more tender than ever before, an inexplicable tenderness, like that of a mature woman. But I wanted to take her roughly, bring her back from the arms of a stranger man and give it to her in such a way that she could never ever leave me again. Oh, I didn’t realize that it was I who had left her and that there was nothing to be brought back.

When we made love, something went wrong. She didn’t really participate, holding back. I was so aroused and her resistance bothered me, and with the rough voice of a feverish man, I ordered her to open up. Then she closed herself off completely, became cold as a stone, and I pulled out my cock and she rolled to the side and it was over.

I saw her often after that in my clique, and we talked sometimes, but it was superficial talk. “How are you?” “Oh, pretty good,” she was now careful to always keep her distance. At that time, it was me who cried, secretly in bed at night, every time I saw her and had to think about her. Sometimes I drove past her apartment on Sycamore Ave. more by chance. And when the light was on upstairs, I thought about ringing the bell. But then I imagined that she was with another lover and going through the same torment as she had with me, and even if we got back together, the torment would just keep repeating itself, always the same torment, her torment, my torment.

© Maniwolf – German Original by Maniwolf. Translated with DeepL.com and edited by Maniwolf. To be reviewed by USAtranslations.org