I have a friend named Auburn. Well, she’s now known as Auburn in the short time i dated her in the early 90s, she went by her given name: Heather.
Auburn has been through a lot. I don’t think she’d mind my sharing this and i’ll check with her later but she was emotionally neglected by her mother, physically (but not sexually) abused by her dad, which by its nature is also emotional abuse and then she was also sexually abused by a friend of the family starting when she was 9 years old.
I was incredibly inexperienced when she and i went out. I’d dated two women before her- my first girlfriend who was a bit of a… well, lots of drama was involved at various times. And then the second woman i dated and that lasted for a month.
This is to say that i had some pretty unreasonable thoughts and expectations on what women were… rather, what they were “supposed” to be. And this is one of the two reasons why Heather and i didn’t date for long. And that’s on me. I was stupid, inexperienced, immature and… well, i was an ass.
The other reason is that the same week she met me, she met a guy who she would eventually spend 10 years with. Some of those years they were married until they weren’t.
Before i go into what this post is about, i want to rewind so the beginning of this post and explain a couple of remarkable things about Heather that stuck out to me and has become two of the most important memories i have of her.
It’s the early 90s. I think at the time i had my 386/ 12MHz. This is a couple or more years before Netscape. I had a 14″ VGA monitor, 4 MB of RAM and a dial up modem. One of the local BBS’ i was on was called Austin Matchmaker. And you have to remember that back then, there were no selfies posted. Everything was text or ASCII. If you were on Usenet and wanted to download an image, you had to find all of the parts of it, CAT (concatonate) them together and then open them in an image viewer. But the only mobile phones back then were the size of a brick, an antenna that you could stab someone with and were relegated to those with more money than common sense.
I had this habit back then of giving asinine answers to the questions on my profile there. I’ve always had a strong sense and a deep appreciation of the absurd and i filled my questionnaire with asinine, silly and absurd answers as was my wont.
And probably still is.
One evening, a message comes to me from Heather. It read, “Cut the shit. I want to get to know you.”
To this day… and i’m typing this now as a mid 59 year old… to this day, Heather was and IS the only person to dismiss my armor of absurdities and let me know she was curious about me.
Gold star earned, Heather. Boop!
The second thing that i remember about her from then happened one evening when i was at her house in S. Austin (off of Brodie Lane, for anyone that cares). She was on a phone call that i could tell was emotional. I remember that when she came back into the living room to be with me, she was rattled but also relieved.
She had taken the time to track down her abuser from her childhood and call him.
It was a singular act of courage that kind of became my defining memory of her. You have to remember, this is DECADES before the MeToo movement. Also, tracking someone down wasn’t always easy.
Heather and her long term boyfriend, Matthew, would live together and eventually get married. There came a time when the woman i lived with and dearly loved would share a duplex with her and Matthew. And so we’d see each other on a near daily basis until i moved to San Francisco to be with my girlfriend at the time.
The day i packed the last of our items on the truck would be the last day i ever saw her.
In the years after we went our separate ways, lots of things happened. Heather and Matthew eventually divorced over irreconcilable differences. Heather went to Burning Man one time and it was either there or shortly thereafter that she decided Heather was in her rear view mirror and Auburn was born. It was also, to the best of my understanding that around this time, Auburn decided she wanted to be a sex worker.
And so she did.
It was during this time we didn’t communicate much. She had her life and then in late 1998, my world violently unraveled when i lived in San Francisco.
Eventually i learned that she worked in Nevada a bit and i know she had a stint at The Bunny Ranch (i think that’s what it’s called) and then i know she did some solo work and specialized in what i’d eventually learn is called GFE – a Girlfriend Experience.
But our communications were spotty by then. I’d hear from her once every couple or three years and was never quite clear on what was going on with her. Eventually i’d be with the woman i dated between 2008 and 2012 and for reasons that i won’t go into right now, her name was brought up with some degree of frequency.
And that kind of kicked off our communicating more often which meant that gaps of years became a gap of a year or a few months. And then, of course, my relation with that particular woman came to its insane and stupid end. I’ve commented on this a few times over the years so if you want to know more, you can read my previous posts.
As an aside, i don’t think i ever got around to linking that absolutely insane email she sent me. I should do that some evening.
And long story made short, a couple or three years ago i wrote a long handwritten letter to her. I brought up the two things i remember the most about her from when i met her (there were others but those were the two non-sexual things that i always cherished). I also took some accountability and apologized for my lack of maturity back then, which included my lack of appreciation for who she was and that i’ve often wondered what would have happened between us HAD i been more mature and had i been more experienced then than i was.
Fast forward to the last few months. We spoke on the phone for the first time in two decades in late spring/ early summer and we’ve been speaking and sending texts back and forth with some degree of frequency.
Last Saturday night, she called as i was getting ready to go to sleep and we had an extended conversation.
And it was something she said then that is what i was going to write about tonight. Unfortunately as is usually the case, i don’t get to sit down and write until my day is almost over. That means that i have to end this here and try to come back to it tomorrow or tomorrow’ish.
shelly