Armand in a Sea of Skin: a Sexual Memoir

Last christmas, I got a card from my old friend Armand Daniel that shocked me considerably. The card was one of those photo things that have such currency in the suburbs, and it showed a happy family grouped in front of a fireplace: Two little boys with miniature Armand faces were smiling for all they were worth, probably in anticipation of the spoils of the season, and their mother was resting her head on Armand's shoulder. That was what shocked me. Years ago, when Armands and I had been close, I'd seen hundreds of similar heads on his shoulder, and it had never occurred to me, once I'd lost touch with him, that he would fall victim to monogamy. He had such miraculous rapport with women, such a gift for getting laid, that it was difficult for me to imagine him entangled in ordinary domestic life. I thought he would still be out in the world somewhere, carrying on as he'd done in the past.

During the time of our friendship, I lived in constant envy of Armand. We met in San Francisco, back in the late Sixties. Supposedly, you could find free love on any corner in those days, but that wasn't true for most of us. Instead, we struggled with our desires, as young men almost always do, and spent long hours wondering why we were so frequently tongue-tied in the presence of beauty. It should be a simple matter to express your feelings to a woman who attracts you, but often it isn't, especially when you're not yet toughened by experience and so remain terrified by the possibility of rejection. Armand was the only person I knew who was always able to surmount those fears. If there was any free love to be had, Armand got it. He gave substance to the myth. I was too blind and jealous then to puzzle out the secret of his success, but I thought that now, with some distance and maturity under my belt, I with come to understand how a lanky, hawk-nosed bookstore clerk had been such a killer when the chips were down. So I put the Christmas card on the mantelpiece, poured myself a drink and set about the task of reconstructing Armand in his years of glory.

•

The first thing that came to mind was Armand's technique for approaching women. Actually, technique is too strong a word. There was really nothing special about what he did. It was based on straightforwardness, on time-honored principles of flirtation. "I like the way you wear your hair," he'd say, walking up to some gorgeous girl perched on a barstool. Then he would begin asking questions in a soft, cloying voice that had a hint of cunnilingual syrup in it: "Where'd you get it cut? Is it naturally curly? How about the color? Do you use a rinse?" Armand was a master interrogator. His carefully fabricated curiosity made even the most trivial subject--hair, polished nails, the cover of a book protruding from a purse--seem vitally important. It also gave him an air of unimpeachable innocence that caused girls to trust him. He could have been a kid brother from down the block, stealing hearts with his cute inquisitiveness.

The innocent act worked wonders, but perseverance was Armand's biggest asset. If the woman he was after failed to collapse at the crucial moment, he never let it bother him. The most insulting refusal had no effect on his determination. He believed in himself. He just brushed the ashes from his shoulders and sauntered through the cigarette smoke and the jukebox roar, smiling his available smile and searching the crowd for another potential bedmate. Soon enough, he was asking questions again: "Do you always stir your drink with a swizzle stick? Is it better to stir from left to right or right to left?" It was amazing how many diverse types wilted under the glare of his unwavering attention. Stewardesses, nurses, drug fiends, attorneys, devious housewives on the prowl--Armand savored them all, filling a drawer in his room with the sweetly perfumed underwear his paramours had lost in the sheets.

On those rare occasions when his charm deserted him, he fell into a funk and tried to participate in the beer-soaked, pseudo intellectual conversation I was usually having with my pal Bendel, the aspiring novelist. It must be said that Armand was like a duck out of water when it came to ideas. A kind of misery crossed his face as he wrestled with himself to formulate an opinion about, say, Wittgenstein's theories of language. It never occurred to him that Bendel and I knew nothing about Wittgenstein. We were shy and overly sensitive in the presence of women. For us, sex could be frightening as well as exhilarating, so we chose our partners in exacting fashion, with the precise scrutiny of a jeweler looking for flawless gems, which kept us, through most of our youth, in a state of exacerbated horniness. "I can't get involved with a girl unless I love her," Bendel would remark, lighting another Old Gold filter. He was referring not to suspect free love but to the undying devotion Dante had visited on Beatrice. Poor Bendel! A single fuck, deeply felt, drove him to the altar. At 26, he was twice divorced yet ever ready to tie another knot. As for me, I spoke often of the need for a "meaningful relationship," holding myself so tightly in check that I would probably have melted down an orgone box if I'd had courage enough to volunteer for therapy.

All the intellectual nonsense was mystifying to Armand. What was the point of being unattached and blessed with gigantic reserves of testosterone if you were going to waste your nights talking garbage? The only fear Armand had of sex was that he might not get enough of it. He went a little crazy after a few days' deprivation. His sense of discrimination, never very strong, began to function like a faulty instrument, and he was seen in company with some odd-looking women. I remember one whose figure was so abundant that she wore nothing but Hawaiian muumuus, and another whose ability to think had been severely impaired by hallucinogens. Once, during a particularly bad dry spell, Armand took me on a drunken tour of the Tenderloin district, where sad, sunkenarched hookers were walking the streets. They seemed so cold, tired and abused that even Armand, in his ravenous condition, could not bring himself to formulate a request. "You want to stop?" he asked unconvincingly. I didn't want to stop. He shrugged. "Someday," he said, his breath redolent of the wine we'd been drinking, "I'm going to be President."

That was Armand's grand obsession. He believed, as others believe in miraculous cures or UFOs, that someday he would be elected President of the United States. The process by which the transformation from lowly bookseller to head of state would take place remained obscure, rooted in Armand's psyche. He could discuss it only in general terms, which evidenced his faith in the providential workings of the universe. But the belief told much about the sort of person he imagined himself to be, especially if you examined it in tandem with his dreams of flying. He had the dreams often. In them, he soared unfettered through the stratosphere, descending to earth every now and again to help out beleaguered mortals. Sometimes, he wore a cape, like Superman. The dreams always left him feeling content. On mornings after he'd had one, he'd sit behind his cash register at the bookstore, perfectly at peace, as if he'd just returned from a vacation in a country where the only demands ever made on the meat and the bones that conspire a body were made for a noble purpose.

•

In a way, Armand's flying dreams had their origin in what he'd gone to San Francisco to escape. He had been studying for the priesthood at a small Southern seminary during the two years prior to his arrival on the Coast. How Armand, with his lusty juices, ever got himself into a seminary in the first place was something of a mystery, though I always figured it had to do with his mother, a staunch Catholic to whom he was devoted. In any event, his experience at the seminary was negative in the extreme. He was subjected to every cliché of monastic life--bad food, hard beds, cold showers, periods of enforced silence. The worst thing that happened to him, though, in terms of his masculinity, was the constant threat that he might get entangled in a homosexual affair. He had no active interest in homosexuality; in fact, he'd been engaged to a hometown girl until religion had gripped him. But in seminaries, as in every other all-male enclave, brotherly love has been known to flare into something more tangible and less serene. At 19, Armand was still a bit unsure of his sexual identity, and he came close, once or twice, to joining a fellow seminarian in a passionate embrace. That the embrace could be pure--not definitional in any way--was beyond his understanding. He thought he'd be stamped forever, a gay version of Hester Prynne. That fear was not responsible for his decision to leave the seminary (he just didn't have the necessary spirit of sacrifice), but it lent a certain edge to his career as Casanova, which began in earnest shortly after I met him in 1969.

There was still a hint of the failed priest about Armand then. He was overly polite, awkwardly solicitous. He dressed primly, in wash-and-wear shirts and brown corduroys, and he wore black-horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a scholarly look. He was living with his former fiancée, a thin, pretty girl who had followed him from his home town in Georgia to the West. She was an optimistic sort, always eager to (continued on page 158)Armand in a Sea of Skin(continued from page 94) please. She loved Armand so blindly that he could have picked his toes in her presence without getting scolded. He seemed to be using her as a security blanket. She was safe, a known quantity whose body was as familiar to him as the back roads in the neighborhood where he had grown up. Nothing he did or didn't do--in bed or elsewhere--would have the slightest effect on her feelings for him. But he was uncomfortable around her anyway, because she assumed that they'd be engaged again as soon as he was firmly established at the bookstore. That wasn't the case. Armand was sick of commitments. Matrimony was about as appealing to him as a prefrontal lobotomy, but he wasn't yet ready for total liberation. So he played the dutiful husband-to-be, went back to the apartment right after work and lit up a briar pipe instead of a bomber joint of Acapulcu gold. He was never truly unhappy. He had an honest affection for the girl and a genuine desire to do the proper thing.

Finally, thought, he exploded. He just couldn't contain himself anymore. It was a victory for biology, for the power of repressed forces to rise and have their day. One afternoon, an attractive woman with fine, straw-colored hair walked into the store and bent over to reach for a book on a bottom shelf, revealing an ass of classical proportions. Armand left his station by the cash register and struck up a conversation. He didn't quite know what he was saying, but, much to his astonishment, the woman was responsive. They had a picnic lunch in Union Square. Armand smelled the perfume roaring off her skin. He said, voice quaking, "I'd like to see you again sometime."

She smiled fetchingly and said, "How 'bout tonight?"

Armand couldn't believe it. She had a house in the Marina district, and he went there in a daze. She gave him wine, chicken in dark sauce, Some funny kind of rice with raisins in it. He could barely eat; anxiety was knotting up his stomach. He was waiting for a signal. It came without warning--a hand massaging the back of his neck. Her sheets were purple. There were pictures of Florida all over her walls. Armand, too busy enjoying himself, never asked why.

A week later, he bumped into a girl coming out of a movie matinee, apologized, went with her for coffee and spent the evening at her town house. Suddenly, everything he touched was turning to gold. He was surprised by his success and worried that his live-in lover would find out. He became even more uncomfortable at home, cupping the phone to his mouth and speaking in whispers. A different Armand began to emerge--one with confidence, aplomb, a gift for sensuous adventures. Each new conquest made him bolder and more rapacious. In less than a month, he had discovered one of the major secrets about sex--that every so-called fantasy has its mirror image in the real world. There were, indeed, thousands of women waiting breathlessly for a courageous finger to lift the hem of their skirts and trace an indecent proposal along their thighs. You could have the fish-net stockings, the crotchless panties, the leather boots; that's what Armand learned. Of course, he encountered resistance sometimes; but more often than not, he got what he was after, simply by asking. Like so many other things, gratification proved to be a function of language. You had to express your desires so concretely that they acquired substance in the material world.

The notion that women were ready, even eager, to indulge in carnal games had a profound impact on Armand. His inhibitions started to drop away. I saw him once at a Jefferson Airplane concert with a ravishing blonde who kept her tongue in his ear through most of the 20 minutes it took Jack Casady to complete a bass solo. The next night, Armand showed up at a party with two British secretaries who appeared to be graduates of the Diana Dors School of Mammary Development. The secretaries wore minidresses and spoke with all the street-wise charm of Cockney trollops. They were driving a Bentley that belonged to their employer. "Shall we go for a ride, loves?" they asked.

We went for the ride--appropriately, to Coit Tower, that phallic monument. "This is fantastic," Armand sighed, sinking into the back seat as if into a cloud and emitting sounds of pleasure. "Is this fantastic or what?" I didn't know how fantastic it was, but it certainly beat talking phenomenology with Bendel in smoky bars. It made me think that I, too, might lose my inhibitions and land a bit of free love. So when Armand broke up with his girlfriend and proposed that we share a place to cut expenses, I agreed, hoping that by osmosis I'd absorb the essence of his mastery.

•

We found a terrific seven room railroad flat, the entire upper story of a decrepit building on Stanyan Street. The first thing I did after moving in was set up my stereo. The first thing Armand did was set up his new water bed. I assisted. According to his floor plan, which had maximum ease of seduction as its governing principle, the bed's wooden frame had to be situated in the absolute center of the room. We spent about an hour fiddling with its orientation. Next, we hooked a garden hose to the bathtub tap and attached it to a nozzle in the mattress. Watching the red plastic swell was almost an act of voyeurism. The bed seemed to have a will of its own. It grew like the Great Raft of Sex, a billowy cushion on which the most shocking copulations could be carried out. When it was fully distended and about to burst, Armand covered it with clean sheets and a batik spread he'd bought at an import store. And then, on the far wall, he tacked up a crucifix.

Over the next few weeks, Armand changed his outward appearance, bringing it in line with his new-found raunchiness. Gone forever were the nondescript collegiate clothes, replaced by turtlenecks, flowered shirts and tight trousers that hugged the crotch. When he put on jeans and a favorite pair of Tony Lama boots, he looked like a Hollywood cowboy who ran a stud service on the side. He let his hair grow until it fell in curls across his forehead. He even splashed after-shave on his cheeks, much to my disgust. Armand was not exceptionally handsome, but he had superb muscular grace and knew how to display his body to its best advantage. When we went to the Fillmore Auditorium or to Winterland, he commandeered a portion of the dance floor and proceeded, in stoned rapture, to demonstrate his steps. Women on the fringe of his performance ached palpably to be tapped, to be swept for a moment into his whirling embrace.

I felt like the hippie rat of hell when I joined Armand for a night on the town. Everything about him was slick and streamlined, prepared for action. Only Bendel, who often accompanied us, gave me solace. He was a dear man, a great unpublished writer, but he was also a sartorial zero. A funky beret crowned his balding dome, and his stocky body was always cloaked in an oversize peacoat he'd won from a sailor in a poker game. We made a pretty pair. As soon as we entered the tavern glow, we settled into a booth and picked up the thread of our ongoing dialog, secretly praying that perspicacious ladies would see through our masks, divine the beauty of our poetic souls and offer us the kind of transcendental commingling that would ease our suffering.

Meanwhile, Armand embarked on a much more practical tour. He combed his hair; he flashed his smile. Within minutes, he was yakking up a storm. Why did apparently normal women respond to his questions: "Is that barstool comfortable? Does it need oil?" Dumb questions; questions you wouldn't ask a moron. But they worked. They broke the ice. A shy grin, a slight shifting of weight, a brief release of pheromonal perfume: Armand had another heart in his pocket. He leaned closer to the woman, laughing. His knee pressed lightly against her buttock; his hand tickled the small of her back. He bought a round of drinks. He whispered something in her ear. She blushed. There was a moment's hesitation. Then she excused herself, ducked into the powder room and left with him, off for a night's voyage on the Great Raft of Sex.

How could it be so simple? Whenever I tried to copy Armand's approach, I failed miserably. I stuttered or spilled my beer or lit the wrong end of my cigarette. The thought of rejection killed what little spontaneity I'd mustered; rejection, real or imagined, drove me back to the booth, where I sat with Bendel. Envious, we downgraded the women around us. Sure, they had nice tits, and legs that went on forever, but what did they know about the experimental novel in Argentina? Doubtless, they had no brains. We informed Armand of these opinions. Sometimes, we took out our frustration on him, cruelly probing his soft spots. He listened politely, because the voice of reason, however corrupted, was his mother's voice.

"Well, maybe," he'd say, eyes on the floor. "But I'm still going to be President someday."

The obvious fact that Bendel and I failed to grasp was that intellectual force had nothing to do with bedding girls, at least not in a sleazy beer joint. The girls had no use for complexity; they were after a good time. Armand was keenly aware of that. He was after a good time, too, and he succeeded in getting it by virtue of his unalloyed fondness for women. His tireless pursuit of them was a form of celebration. That's what they responded to--being celebrated. If a girl had an ugly nose, Armand noticed hitherto-unremarked perfection in her lips, her ankles, her eyebrows. The lack of discretion he sometimes showed was really just a generosity of spirit. He absolved his partners of their human flaws--which were as sins in the world of unblemished, late-century sex--and saw them as they wished to be seen. Armand was decent; Armand was fun.

Little wonder, then, that for a while, all his love was free.

•

Eventually, Armand's life became very complicated. Demands were made on his time and on his physical reserves. He confessed to me once that it wasn't easy servicing a different lady almost every night. And they'd started calling in his promises, too, like I.O.U.s. When would he be taking them to dinner? To the concert? To that party over in Berkeley? Armand shook his weary head. He had a date on Saturday, a date on Sunday, a midweek assignation. Rosa, a girl from Ceylon, stayed in the flat for a week, claiming to be lost. A hippie girl who reeked of patchouli refused to leave the water bed. A girl with doe eyes thought Armand loved her--really loved her. Armand lost perspective. He had minor delusions. When he sat next to a famous topless dancer at the counter of a North Beach restaurant, he gave her his phone number and fully expected her to ask him over. Also, he committed a couple of judgmental errors with other men's wives and almost got his ass caught in the closet door. His reputation suffered, but he seemed oblivious.

It was inevitable, I guess, that Armand would fall from grace sooner or later and learn what love was like for ordinary mortals. He got his lesson when his sister, Marie-Therese, arrived at the flat for a week's visit, following her graduation from high school. She was tall and rawboned, and she had the same good-natured temperament as Armand. She'd brought a friend from Georgia with her. To say that Doreen was pretty is to make a terrible understatement. Doreen was a knockout. She had a translucent beauty. Petite, with an hourglass body that brought tears to the eyes, she seemed the very avatar of innocence. Her skin was tanned to a coppery hue, and when she moved, which she did exquisitely, the subtle swish of her skirt seemed to imply that treasures of the highest order were hidden underneath.

None of this was lost on Armand or me. For once, I was as intrigued by a girl as he was. I wouldn't have cared if Doreen were a functional illiterate. And I thought I had the inside track with her, too, because Armand had to act the part of Marie-Therese's upright, honorable older brother. He was really bad at it. He seemed to think that the part required a sort of Stepin Fetchit subservience, so he shuffled from room to room, depositing luggage in dusty corners. Marie-Therese was given the putative guest room (actually, a barren cubicle with a mattress on the floor), while Doreen was assigned to the living-room couch. That worried me a little, since the living room was only a few steps from Armand's bedroom. Would he be able to resist temptation?

In the afternoon, we hit the streets for some obligatory tourism. We drove the girls around the city and showed them such hippie landmarks as the Grateful Dead's house and Panhandle park. I was more animated than usual, taking advantage, I guess, of Armand's uncharacteristic decorum. We had dinner in one of those family-style Italian restaurants where the food is served in quantities large enough to mask its basic offensiveness, and we drank two liters of wine, which stoked my ability to tell funny stories at great length. The wine also had a noticeable effect on Doreen. Although she was technically underage in California, she drank with gusto and assurance, polishing off Marie-Therese's glass whenever Marie-Therese hesitated. A coquette began to shine through that virginal facade. Doreen knew how to handle a double-entendre; her stories always had a sexual edge. Once, she exhibited her pink tongue so lasciviously that I had to look away. I'm sure Armand was about to boil, but he remained on his gentlemanly best behavior. Nothing in his manner suggested that he was interested in her. Even later, when she wanted to dance to the jukebox in a bar, Armand kept his cool. His steps were stiff, unrevealing; he could have been her bodyguard.

It was after midnight when we got back to the flat. Armand said good night and went directly to bed. Marie-Therese did the same, bending to peck Doreen on the cheek. I was overjoyed by their departure, reading in it the magical workings of fate. Clearly, Doreen and I were destined to be lovers. So I put my haphazard program into action by offering her a Budweiser nightcap. She stifled a yawn with her fist and apologized. She was tired from the plane trip, the sight-seeing, the wine, and she needed to catch up on her sleep. The only salve I could squeeze from the moment was that I had six more days in which to romance her. For a while, I lay in bed, in the dark, imagining her breathing just two rooms away. I tried, by hard concentration, to lure her to me, as I often did when there was a woman I wanted in the flat, but I fell asleep before any telekinetic miracles could occur. Not much later, though, I was awakened by the sound of music playing softly somewhere in the night. I slipped on my jeans and padded down the hallway. The living-room door was ajar. Inside, I saw Doreen, swaying back and forth in the moonlight. She was not alone. Armand stood behind her, working wonders with his fingers.

In the morning, I learned that Marie-Therese had also observed the seduction in progress. She blamed Armand for it, even though she must have known that Doreen was equally responsible. It was a case of kindred types' recognizing each other, then exploding. Marie-Therese didn't create a scene, but she conveyed to Armand, by her chilliness, that she was disappointed in him. He felt guilty. He'd bitten into the apple; this was his fall.

For days, he wandered around the flat with a hangdog look on his face, aware for the first time that sex could have negative consequences. He believed that he'd violated a sacred family trust, and so, when Doreen and Marie-Therese left earlier than expected, he retired to his study and did penance. He answered old letters, paid overdue bills and tidied up his bookshelves.

Some evenings, I kept him company. We shot the breeze or played cards. Although I was kind of happy, in a perverse way, that Armand had finally been introduced to the notion of complexity, I hated to see him so depressed. Then, one night, in the middle of a deadly boring cribbage game, he threw down his hand and grabbed for the phone. He dialed a number from memory. "Hello, Rosa?" he said, using his syrupy voice. "How you been lately? You finish that book you were reading? You like it all right?" The Ceylonese girl's melodious response poured out of the receiver, sweet as honey.

Pretty soon, Armand was back in action again, rolling in at odd hours with new women he'd met on a bus or at the bookstore. But I had the feeling, watching him, that he would never again be as free as he'd been during his days of glory.

•

A few months after the Doreen episode, Armand and I drifted apart. I managed to get past my shyness and express myself to a woman I loved, and we moved into a new flat, far from Stanyan Street. Armand was offered a job with a publishing company in the East. He headed for New York, planning to make a big splash, but things didn't work out very well, and he wound up back in Georgia. On the Christmas card, he hadn't said what he was doing there, so I decided to give him a call. I wanted to tell him that, in thinking about him, I'd finally figured out how he had attracted all those girls.

One of the little Armands answered the phone, then put the receiver down to look for Daddy. When Armand came on the line, I recognized his voice immediately. He still had the syrupy accent, the soft-as-silk manner. He said he was glad to hear from me. He told me that on his return to Georgia, he'd driven a taxi for a while, feeling very blue and upset about his bad luck in New York, but that now he ran a company that manufactured automobile parts. "I'm the president," he said, laughing. He had met his wife when she'd come in to buy some bearings at a discount. They had been married six years and had a third kid on the way.

I told Armand that I thought it was terrific how he'd settled down and had a family and made a respectable life for himself. It just went to show that there was a potential husband inside every rogue. But I wondered if he didn't suffer sometimes from the old itch. Could he really hold himself in check when he saw an extraordinary pair of legs glide across a room?

There was a pause.

"Well," said Armand, almost in a whisper, "you know, I do get up to Atlanta every now and then."

Thousands of women waited for a courageous finger to trace and indecent proposal along their thighs."