CHAPTER 7: MILLS COLLEGE FOR WOMEN

Danger – a word that instills fear into some, while in others there is nothing quite so arousing.

The Fifth Dimension was singing “Stoned Soul Picnic” as I parked in the visitor’s lot of Mills College. On Sunday evenings Mills College campus was quiet, all the resident students back from weekends at home and preparing for bed, but the dorms were still open for visitors. I got out of the car and headed for Andrews Hall. After being blackmailed by Sweets and feeling taken advantage of, I needed some female company. Renee Sorenson was as close to a girlfriend I had. Well, not as in steady or future relationship. Certainly not marriage. I’m not prepared to settle down with wife and family just yet. I’ll leave that to my bro. My in-the-moment girlfriend has honey-blonde hair, hazel eyes, and a gap between her two front teeth, called a diastema which, according to my theory of flaws, increases a woman’s beauty. I developed this theory based on what Edgar Allan Poe said: There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. In my sophomore year in college I dated Mary Ann Majerus who had a wandering left eye. It was totally sexy. Renee is at least four inches taller than me and reminds me of Ingrid Bergman who was also tall and Nordic. Renee’s a music major in her senior year at Mills, a college known for their music department. She brags that Dave Brubeck had once taught at Mills. I don’t listen to a lot of jazz, a little too abstract for me, but I knew who he was. Renee plays first violin in the Oakland Junior Philharmonic. I attended one of her concerts and was proud of myself for not falling asleep.

I called up to Renee’s room. Soon she was down, and we were walking to the Mustang arm in arm. We got in and she flung herself across the seat into my arms. Our mouths sprung open and our tongues collided like we’d both turned a street corner and weren’t paying attention. We laughed and she bit my neck. Who ever said, northern women are cold? Probably a Sicilian. We went at it for a while and then backed off. Steering wheels and gear shifts require creative adjustment when involved in sexual groping. Tonight, however, we both recognized the front seat action as hors d’oeuvres. The main course would come later.

I drove into the Berkeley hills and parked off Grizzly Peak Road at a turnout overlooking the Bay, a place I like to go to from time to time for thinking and pleasure. I turned off the engine. Below us were the bright night-lights of Oakland and in the distance the glitter of San Francisco, a solitary light winking atop Coit Tower. That Coit Tower has been considered San Francisco’s phallic symbol had nothing to do with my choice of a make-out location.

As much as I needed to talk to someone about my dilemma, confiding in Renee would be a mistake. She was a girl of the Sixties, which meant that her standards were a mixed bag of convoluted philosophies. Sex was cool. She referred to cops as pigs and had been arrested at a sit in at the Alameda Naval Air Station. In January, she’d traveled to Washington D.C. to be part of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade Anti-War March on Congress. On the other hand, she also attended the Lutheran church regularly and played the organ for the choir. When dating high-minded, brilliant women, it’s my policy to avoid controversial subjects such as the murder of Winona Davis. When I mentioned Vincent’s name, her eyes lit up. She has a thing for stories about our brotherly predicaments we get into, the used car business being surprisingly dangerous. They turn her on. My musical genius is aware of and embraces this inclination whole heartedly and bodily. My first thought was to tell her about our repossessing a car from a 260-pound drunk with anger management issues. I weighed the possibility, but tonight I needed some real heat, and Vincent’s scrapes tended to be even more dramatic and hair-raising than mine, for reasons only a psychologist could explain because my twin is mostly a stable and logical person.

At this point, you might ask why the lookout and not some place more comfortable like my apartment, which was not an option this evening with Sweets in it. But that’s not the reason. Even if my apartment were available, I prefer making love in an automobile. There’s a creativity required of a man and a woman having sex in an automobile that leads to a different, perhaps heightened, sexual experience than the one you have in a bed, particularly one’s own bed. It is my theory - one I’ve proven to be true - that automobiles are like aphrodisiacs. Two bodies lusting after one and another packed into the back (or front) of an all-leather Mustang, breathing the same confined air made musky by pheromones firing off like pistons, well, you get the picture.

A bedroom doesn’t have the same primal atmosphere. Not that I have a whole lot against making love in a bed, it’s fine if we’re both in the mood for a more laid-back experience. If that’s the case, I offer the damsel in question, a bedroom in the remarkable Claremont Hotel, nestled in the Berkeley hills or a suite in the Mark Hopkins on Knob Hill in San Francisco where I have a working arrangement with two night managers, both Saint Mary’s grads. We alums stick together. Autos at cost is not too high a price to pay. At all costs, hah, hah, I avoid taking a woman home to my apartment. It is my theory that love-making in one’s home bed tends to give a woman ideas about stability, long-term relationships, image of walking down the aisle, bambini, and a life time of togetherness. Get the picture.

Renee has never once hinted that she required a bed. Tonight she curled her legs under her, smiled wickedly, and asked, pretty please for a story about Vincent, preferably one I hadn’t told her before. Something new and daring.

I had just the story in mind.

“Okay,” I said. “Here goes. There was this time a crazy person wound up sitting under Vincent’s desk. I mean a real nut case.” I could tell by the eager look on her face that this was new to her. “It happened a couple of months ago, the way Vincent told it to me.” I begin in my best imitation of my twin’s voice:

You see, Victor, I’m on the phone talking to Jack about this and that, and I look out the window. Across the street, I see a big guy with no shirt and muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy looks mean and he’s holding a baseball bat and swinging it into the palm of his hand, snap, snap. Nothing happy about the way he’s doing it, like he’s itching to crack somebody’s head.

I say to Jack. “There’s a nut across the street swinging a baseball bat, looking right at me.”

“Get your ass out of there,” Jack says.

I agree, but before I can get out of the chair, the dude starts running across East 14th, cars blaring their horns. He almost gets run over by a bus. He’s paying no attention, his eyes fixed on me. Jesus, I don’t know what to do. I know Sylvia keeps that old Second World War pistol her daddy gave her in her desk, but the guy’s already inside, standing in the door, staring at me. I put up my hands. He doesn’t do anything just stares.

Renee had her left arm around my shoulder; her right hand had moved to my thigh. “What in the world did Vincent do,” She asked, breathing heavily.

“Nothing, he didn’t need to do anything.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense.” She was snuggling, her hand on my thigh now on my crotch.

“You won’t believe it. According to Vincent, the guy drops the bat, falls on the floor, crawls under his desk, wraps himself up into the fetal position and starts blubbering like a baby. The baseball bat wasn’t even wood; it was made out of plastic.”

“So?”

“So, nothing. Vincent calls the cops. They come over and haul the poor bastard away. They tell Vincent since Governor Reagan closed down the mental hospitals, the streets have been full of crazies.”

Renee removed her hand from my crotch, which I took to mean she was disappointed in the story. I thought it was pretty damn tense. Perhaps I should have embellished it.

“Why does your secretary have a pistol?” Renee asked. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

A rational question, one that I’d asked Sylvia when we took over the business from Pop. Her response was that a good Catholic girl had a right to protect herself, given the nature of the neighborhood. Renee said that sounded logical. She’d thought about buying a pistol herself, considering Mills College was not in one of the better sections of Oakland, just north of the Fruitvale Ave neighborhood, the home turf of the Amigos, one of a growing number of Hispanic gangs in Bay Area.

“What kind of a gun does Sylvia have?” Renee asked.

“Sylvia says it’s a Beretta her father brought home from Italy after the Second World War. It’s a scary looking thing.”

Renee placed her hand back on my crotch and said, “I’d love to see it.”

I took that as a hint and moved my hand over hers.

Keeping her left hand in place, Renee reached for the dash with her right hand, snapped on the radio and tuned in to a classical station. A violin something, a little sad, a little passionate.

I suggested a move from the front bucket seats to the back, and Renee agreed that would be wise because she could see my gun better.

Talk about a sense of humor. I recalled my brother Mario telling me about when he went through boot camp that a sergeant holding a rifle with one hand and his crotch with his other hand kept yelling: This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for shooting, this is for fun

I got out, walked to her side and opened the door for her. We Italians are known for being gentlemen.

Driving back to drop Renee off, I asked her what the name of the music was. Her dreamy response was Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto in E Minor, opus 64. Given the results the concerto produced, I vowed to get a lot of the guy’s music.

I returned to my apartment with three hickys, a depleted sperm count and a smile on my face. I imagined Renee back in her dorm room equally satisfied. The theory I have developed about Renee and me is we’re two people who should never be married but should meet once or twice a year for the rest of our lives to engage in fabulous sex. Such a relationship would allow us to marry partners for worthier reasons than sex, such as love, friendship, and bambini.

The light was off in the living room. I tipped toed in hoping not to wake Sweets, but the only thing on the couch were a bunch of hard candy wrappers, no Sweets. He was, however, in my bedroom, laying on my comfortable king size Sealy mattress curled up under my comforter, snoring lightly. For a moment, I thought to wake him and point him in the direction of the couch, but the bum would probably want to start talking. I was feeling pretty blissful and didn’t want to be reminded that tomorrow I’d have to figure out how to solve a murder. I grabbed a pillow and blankets from the closet and headed for the couch. I was almost asleep when I heard a rustling and looked up, expecting to see Sweets. Instead, standing by the window was Winona. I leaped from the couch, tripped over the coffee table and fell on the floor. I scrambled to my feet. The window was open and the Venetian blinds were rattling. Nothing there. The rest of the night, I stared at that window, falling asleep at first light.