I never ate papaya until I licked a glob off Sandra's cheek after her Mexican abortion. A mutual friend set it up and Sandra flew from Chicago. We three sat in the airport waiting for her return flight. I'd a ticket aboard the jetliner, too, because, after a night tripping on Dexamyl spansules, we decided to get married. Rather, I prodded and she agreed.

We poured the granules from the capsules directly into our mouths. Hadn't every woman tripped out the day following an abortion? I hadn't read guidebooks and figured we'd gone sophisticated. When Sandra used a rusty can opener to gouge blood from her arm I thought it was because of my presence rather than post-abortion remorse.

Sandra left us, walking downstairs and out of sight for an immeasurably long time. Maybe her way of telling me, forget it, who said we had to get married just because we met in college. Of course, during the trip, seated on my bed supported by cider blocks, Sandra'd used a blanket like a tent, tossing it over her head and blotting me out. I thought I was the desert, her eyes like a Bedouin's piercing empty darkness. I got the impression she wanted me to vanish just as she wished the fetus aborted.

Flying back to Chicago, we held hands seated on opposite sides of the aisle. Some passengers ahhed and cooed about this devotion but I couldn't help thinking she altered seating arrangements so she wouldn't have to sit next to me. That notion perhaps a bit of post-drug paranoia, but it slithered through my solar plexus until we landed at O'Hare. I lived in a suburb thirty-seven miles from Chicago and she lived in a larger town (it had a college) closer to the city.

I called my parents from the airport and told my dad I'd come back from school in Mexico City and for him to pick me up. Oh, yeah, I was going to get married. He exclaimed loud and clear, "No you won't. You don't have a job." I felt venom surge through the wire. He meant I hadn't the balls.

"It won't be hard to find one," I said.

"They don't come out of thin air, bub." When he talked in the car, his reasoning of a no-go with the marriage reminded me why I lay claim to being a revolutionary, though not an anarchist decrying marriage as caving in to bourgeois decadence. What most distressed him was why hadn't I mentioned her once during college in Iowa.

I took my car and drove into Chicago the next day. I applied for work at large chain bookstore in the Loop. I filled out the form and a distinguished man sat behind a desk. He spoke amiably about books, and asked me three questions: Who wrote Winnie the Pooh? Who wrote The Ambassadors? Who wrote The Hollow Men? I named them and got the job starting the next day. "Pretty fast, your answers," the man in the three-piece suit told me.

"I do everything fast," I said, worrying that I couldn't get anymore speed as before in Mexico where they legalized pharmacies to sell it. I was glad I wasn't hooked. I never used downers, preferring to crash every time.

I walked briskly to my car, the spring air competing with the Loop's grime. I drove to Sandra's home. Elm Street: how sweet, this Americana. She and her mother rented the second floor of a comfortable-looking house of red brick and white siding. I entered from the rear. A car tire hung on thick rope around an oak tree's branch. I walked the stairs and knocked. I waited for a while, thinking I should've phoned first. I wasted no time seeing her, fearing that I'd lose her for good if I hadn't. I was impetuous, careless and impractical, father-inspired thoughts flitting through my mind. I blinked those quickly away.

She opened the door with a book in her hands. "It's about spiders," she said, before we kissed and hugged. "No mouths and no wings. The ganglia are beneath the esophagus and the central nervous system is enclosed in the cephalothorax." No more romantic philosophizing. Spiders were anti-me.

"I thought you liked Camus's The Rebel, not invertebrae," I said. We fooled around on the couch and then her bed. After three times, she said, "Almost." I wasn't hurt or shocked, only fortunate to know a woman with greater carnal knowledge than me. In college she went with a guy named Rob and always came to me, saying, "With Rob it's vrooom, all over." Her mother was working at the local college cafeteria.

I drove back home only to quickly turn around the next morning and take the commuter train to Chicago and my new job. I worked upstairs in nonfiction hardbacks, though I wanted to work downstairs with paperbacks. I never bought a hardback book before, liking the tactile sensuousness of paperbacks, how they humanized reading, making it less foreboding. Downstairs employees wore street clothes while above I had to wear a suit and tie. They wanted employees to look sharp, selling expensive books to conservative consumers. It seemed the flow of consumers went downstairs, and I was left standing around, twiddling with my tie as some vaudeville comedian. My agog-vision was to see Sandra walk into the store, buying a book as I rang it up.

Every day it was the train into Chicago and back, then driving to Sandra's house about twenty miles away. I came back from her house seeing three dots, making a triangle: home, work, Sandra, home, work, Sandra. On weekends I visited her twice, sometimes once when she told me her mother needed her. Sandra told me she really loved my hands, yes, hands.

"Does that mean I can be a hand model, weaving my hands through the air, getting pretty gals to swarm over me?" She examined them, touching the tiny alleys of palm creases, turning them over, complimenting my fingers, my large veins, the flawless fingernails.

"Look, Floyd, see his hands," she said to Floyd, a tall and bobbly guy who hung around during some of my visits. "You haven't hands like his." They laughed much longer than the hand joke warranted. He ran a classic film theater, inviting us to drop by. I was suspicious of his social distance from Sandra, how far away they stood from each other. I visualized them naked, pressed together. They never touched, while I touched Sandra often. She invited me to dinner with her mother the next weekend.

Her mother joked around, telling me Sandra wasn't ever going to settle into comfy marriage. "I never did," she said.

Sandra said, "That's because Chuck fell off a roof and killed himself and you never married again." Searching for her missing father, Sandra sought out as many men as possible.

"I know the score," she said.

Sandra scoffed. "Get real. You gave up everything after Chuck clunked out ten years ago."

I wanted to bury my head in the meat loaf. Death talk.

"I don't tell you everything I do, Sandra," her mother said.

"Mom isn't going to get married, for sure," Sandra said, looking at me a long time. A dog barked outside, a Volkswagen bug ground its gears, crows in the backyard trees cawed.

Her mother casually said, "Sandra won't get married. You know how she is. Boyfriends all over the country."

Sandra laughed. "Only Stan in New York, mother." Sandra saw my expression, jealousy masked by fear. "I met him a college. You don't know him."

Outside of classes, I hadn't mixed well, hanging back, knowing no male student who dated. I liked Sandra because she asserted herself. I probably was a latent homosexual. She sensed my unease, jumped up and went to her room. Coming back, she showed me a stamped envelope with Stan's New York City address.

"Should I send it or not?" she asked me.

"He's your friend. Of course, mail it," I said, in spite of my fear. We're getting married and she was sending Stan a letter? I readied myself on the gibbet.

"I'll be visiting him maybe," she said. "I'll show you something else." She opened a spiral notebook. It had Mrs. Sandra and then my last name written many times. Practicing for a joint bank account, perhaps. Maybe she wanted to get used to her married name when she wrote letters, trying to brain-imprint it rather than accidentally writing Stan's full name down. Was she taking her role as Dr. Strangelove too seriously, unable to conceal her Nazi tendencies?

After dinner Sandra wanted to see a movie. Before we left her mother said, "We like living together, Sandra and I. A good team." I felt like a no-armed baseball pitcher: severely handicapped.

I drove a few blocks under maple tree bowers, Sandra giving directions.

"Floyd scarfed a Louise Brooks film from the college archives. Don't know what it is," she said.

"Who's she?" Maybe I might ferret out Sandra's script seeing Brooks onscreen.

"She epitomizes death and sex. Either she dies or men die in her movies."

When we got to Floyd's theater, really an old Mom & Pop converted grocery store, a big sign hung in the front: Presenting Laurel & Hardy Films.

"Do you want to see them instead?" she asked. "Brooks got cancelled."

"Not really. Saw them all on TV in the fifties."

I looked at the window and saw Floyd making a circle with his thumb and forefinger, twisting the "binoculars" and making faces. Goofy, but spot-on for L & H. Sandra laughed, doing the same twisted binoculars.

"At least he isn't busted for 'renting' Brooks," she said.

"Pretty loose with their films."

"They trust him. If there's anyone I'd want to be, it would be Louise," she said.

"How about Emma Goldman? She would've fit in these days," I said.

"She wanted abortion legalized. Good person."

She then directed me to a friend's place on the other side of town. It was a second-floor apartment, with three people standing listlessly in the living room, gazing into a smaller room. One guy wore army pants and boots. He looked grim. He still wore his stripes. The streets were filled with anti-war, passionate protestors, and yet I'd never been in the same room with a vet. I walked this metaphorical boulevard, Sandra showing me real lives. Was she purposefully trying to put the fear of reality into me?

The year before, in an East Coast city, I bought an army jacket with corporal stripes on both sleeves at a thrift store. Once, I stumbled into a hip bar scene. A long-hair came over, looking harmless until he pulled out a knife from his boot. His big, beery grin reassured me as he surgically removed the stripes. "Stand up for anarchy," he said, slurping more beer. That night a woman mentioned Emma Goldman, the first time I heard of her in spite of having a B.A. degree.

Sandra never introduced me to anyone because that was bourgeois. I couldn't decide: had that made it more casual or more tense, for me as well as others? A short-haired, blond guy held forth, six others listening, laughing, one I saw in tears. No one paid attention to us. Or was it because of me, blanking me out? Ostracism? Sandra listened, too. “He gives great lectures, wired. Better than Billy Graham," she said, laughing. The others on sofas or chairs, Sandra and I seated nearby at his feet, heard him riff. Guitars planged softly on the record player. No drugs were offered to us, probably because Sandra wasn't much of a druggie. But I still couldn't help feeling I crimped her style. Maybe she brought me here to have me purposely shunned. I cheated, connecting off the speed-rapper. We left the stoner without saying goodbye. It was midnight when I got back home.

Dad still up, Saturday his bourbon-and-soda drinking night. He watched me undress, sitting at my desk chair, telling me, "Your mother and I talked it over and we want to get to know this Sandra."

"What's to know?" I was ingenuous because I wanted him to butt out. "OK."

"We'll have luncheon next Saturday at your cousin's place," he said. "Your uncle and aunt will be there too." I agreed and flopped naked into bed. Just before dropping off, I realized I'd never accepted an invitation naked before. If I were to invent a TV game show I'd call it Humiliation, Then You Die.

Sandra came over as scheduled but wanted to swim at a nearby lake. I couldn't discourage her. She insisted and was unmovable, inflexible, determined to make a late appearance at my cousin's. That, or she wanted to show off in her two piece suit and have me there in swim trunks, with macho guys. If not kicking sand into my face, then putting hostile moves on me, the boyfriend of the cute blonde. Sitting on a raft twenty yards out, two guys and Sandra got into double entrendres. It never stopped until I said we gotta split and eat. Learning to swim as a kid, I nearly drowned in a Y pool, jumping off the deep end rather than hanging at the splash rail with other naked guys in the shallow end.

But we weren't late. The eight of us ate a scrumptious meal, then sipped wine as we sat in a circle, glasses balanced in our laps. My cousin's wife left to do the dishes.

"That's to take good care of fine china," my mother said. I wished she detailed the history of fine china. It would've soaked the tension out of the room.

My uncle deftly tried to make small talk. "What do you think of the world situation?" he asked no one in particular, though ever since I could remember he'd asked me that whenever he could. Sandra, bless her spider-book heart, clammed up except for non-committal Well's, I don't know's and That's good's. I wanted to get her going on spiders but decided to run out the clock in silence. It was one thing to hear speed freaks and have not much conversation, but another with straights. No cross examinations for her. The opulent furniture, the well-lighted rooms, the fine carpets---I knew it awed her. Her silence nailed the stake of silence through post-prandial chitchat.

Emily Post's book of etiquette prevailed: keep the conversational ball rolling. Sandra deflated that ball. There was blood in the streets, dope in our heads and massacres in Vietnam, yet Ms. Post still reigned among my relatives. I knew I blew it when I addressed my uncle's big question and said, "I'm going to Chicago to protest the war when it's convention time." They pounded me, leaving me in ruins because I offered nothing but corny, anti-establishment arguments. But our expressions remained pleasant except for Sandra, who looked embarrassed. It was like being a Catholic under the guns of Oliver Cromwell: oppression. Finally the soiree broke up.

The next week progressed slowly to Friday, the day paranoia swept through me at the bookstore. The white shirt started choking me and customers asked questions I couldn't answer. The manager told me to take showers before work because, "They've been complaints." I no longer tried the longwise newspaper fold on the train back home: too tricky a maneuver. Home, I watched baseball, drinking lots of Diet Coke. The proverbial father/son baseball connection lost its glow, leaving only gloaming.

We sounded out each other gently without mentioning my upcoming marriage. He paid for visits to a shrink in Evanston. After the diagnosis of being borderline-hospital, I looked out the doctor's window and waved to Sandra seated in my car parked outside the doctor's office.

"My shrink said I was borderline-bedroom," Sandra said after I left the doctor's office, recalling how her psychiatrist evaluated her while attending college. We laughed but it unsettled me that he might've planked her in his office. She had certainly passed that "bedroom look" threshold. The calculus: hers was a glut, mine emaciation.

Now, I consumed not only diet drinks, but lots of coffee. I smoked a pack and a half a day. I missed those strong Mexican cigarettes. I had trouble getting to sleep and problems getting up. But after three coffees and cigarettes, my nervous system got stimulated enough for me to carry on. The bright lights at the bookstore hurt my eyes and made me jittery. My eyes bounced in their sockets, I grew constipated, I lost my appetite except for cheeseburgers, and I quarreled with my sister (we had always got along).

I got off the train and walked through cavernous Northwestern Station on Madison Street as usual on Monday, feeling viscera dropping from my body. I slouched toward the street until I was overpowered with nausea oozing out pores, making my head spin, making me weak and scrawnier than I was. I slunk, then collapsed into a phone booth and dialed the psychiatrist's office, getting his answering service. I cried that business as usual made me sick, my voice cracking and trembling. I phoned my mother. She told me to take the next train home. I sat in the last car, a rear seat on a train with no other passengers. By mid-afternoon I was on the mental floor of the same hospital I was born in.

I told a nurse I was an ouroboros, two snakes swallowing each other, cyclical nature itself. "Here's lookin' at you," I said to her. Or was it life=death? Sandra: my life, my death. Too confused on Thorazine and Stelazine, I tried drawing those snakes but came up with an indistinguishable mish-mash of crayon bleeding the page. An older woman and I got high eating peanut butter we spooned in a food nook, off the main room. I begged the doctor and nurses to let me make a telephone call to Sandra. My queries persisted but I backed off when they turned into verbal assaults. I was in the shock section, three small rooms where the most severe patients showing no improvement were taken to the electro-shock room.

One nurse said she'd massage me but I refused. No reason given because I feared touching. She pressed me, saying, "You must have aphephobia, then." I saw that word branded into both my hands, those remarkable extremities Sandra raved about. Finally, she visited on her own accord, having called my parents. We never touched. "My fingers are too numb to hug you," I said. She said it must be the anti-psychotics. Sandra tried to be affectionate but I thought it a ruse, she feeling more at liberty to show her feelings in a protected environment, this middle-class dumping ground. I wouldn't allow her the pleasure of deceit.

I told her about the triangle, not the one between Floyd, Sandra and myself, but home, work and Elm Street. She said it probably was withdrawing from speed, something I disregarded. The inexpensive speed bought in those phamarcias, often the druggist telling me, "Un poquito." She told me she'd call when I got out. I was shortly released.

I stayed home, having quit work. Already, my parents pushed me to search the newspaper and find a job. I told them I had to get used to the bigtime dope first. By the end of May I improved, at least I began reading again. She never called.

I was getting my shit together so I phoned Sandra and made a date for the Art Insititute, ready to lose myself in the Monets. We would meet outside a couple hours before it closed. Like the guy in a Frank Zappa song on the Album Freak Out who complained, "I waited six weeks and you never called," I, too, was stood up. I rushed home, going seventy to get to my phone. Why I never used a public phone near the museum hadn't entered my mind. The black wall phone in our kitchen had always made the Sandra connection. Like Pan shaking the bushes and frightening travelers, provoking angst, I got a panic attack. Dangerous road, marriage. I'd tell Sandra all about the myth. I looked it up in my encyclopedia.

But when I called at dusk, she was crying, saying her cat was stuck up in a tree. Pan got lost somewhere in my hippocampus. I'd come over the next day. I hung up and turned on TV. Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed in an L.A. hotel's kitchen. I panicked. I had always told people that when the shit fell from the sky, I'd be there. The next day, not wanting a forty mile round trip, I called Sandra's hometown college, getting the number of the local SDS chapter. I felt secure knowing like-minded revolutionaries should stick together in a crisis. A surreal act since SDSers would be among those thrown in detention camps and erased.

I watched the upheaval and riots (rebellion? agents? provocateurs?) on Chicago's streets during the August Democratic party convention. It was when demonstrators were clubbed bloody that I wept. I identified with victims. I couldn't help myself.

The next day I sat on the patio and wrote Sandra a letter, about politics, books from the Saturday Review. Anything but us. I had no idea how to close the letter, hearing Hey Jude on the radio playing from the family room. So I ended with: Hey Jude will be #1. A breeze passed through the backyard. I listened to the lyrics, "Let it out and let it in." She disappeared from my life permanently.