In the summer between my junior and senior years of high school it came to be that I attended a week long High School Journalism conference at Syracuse University. It was a week that changed my life.

It so happens that my oldest brother Fred was living in Syracuse, working on his PhD in biophysics so I had a local connection that became central to this story.

But at first it was what one might expect: we attended classes where I learned good stuff, such as why serif fonts are easier to read than sans-serif fonts.

We went to see President Johnson give a speech and I was already enough of a little rebel to act up during that speech and express my distaste for this clunky old southern politician who had taken the place of our beautiful young John F. Kennedy, slain about three years prior. The Vietnam War has already started to fester.

A bunch of us guys, in the men’s dorm, formed a tight group and stayed up all night telling dirty jokes until dawn. It was a preview of college bull sessions, and a great taste of freedom from parental discipline.

One day the idea of a talent show came up and I said I would play the guitar I had brought along – if this girl I had my eye on – would sing with me. We had been flirting a bit and I had shown off what chops I had playing Cocaine, as I had learned it from listening to Dave Van Ronk, the great folk-blues guy. I had never come anywhere near cocaine, but it was a cool song and I could do a creditable guitar version.

So she, my tall, beautiful new friend and I sang it together and then we became inseparable. We spent every minute we could together. On one trip the group took she and I sat tightly together while our friends sang  to us the current Beach Boys song, Wouldn’t It Be Nice (if we were married). At some point one of the counselors got annoyed at us and threw us off another bus that was leaving to take everyone else on some sort of trip.

So there we were, alone together on the campus of Syracuse, with nothing to do but be together. Which was all we could think of being.

I had never kissed a girl.

That day we kissed and kissed and went as far as kids could go with all our clothes on and no private place.

The last night of the conference I decided I must play the Syracuse card that I had been holding onto quietly: we would sneak out of the dorms and go join my brother Fred and his wife at his nearby basement apartment, and then spend the night. Together. 

I think we may have gone with Fred and his wife to the infamous Captain Mac’s Clam Shack where Fred often played folk music, but much is lost in a haze of Ballentine Ale.

So we are back at that basement apartment and she and I are now in bed together, and we are going to consummate our astonishing teenage love affair.

But it was only about 3 or 4 days since my first kiss. Whatever I knew about actual sex was from reading. On top of all the awkward uncertainty and feverish groping there was the realization that we needed to avoid getting her pregnant and she had a meltable item that was supposed to be inserted to avoid pregnancy. 

So after some extended fumbling and mumbling we just fell asleep, exhausted.

The next day we wandered back to the site of the conference where parents were picking up their kids. My girl’s best girl friend at the conference had already left and my girl, missing saying goodbye, dissolved into huge tears, for which I blamed myself.

We parted company as her parents drove her off, already retreating from our roles as Romeo and Juliet into a couple of high school kids, under the close eye of parents.

I skulked back to my brother’s apartment, feeling exhausted but also feeling like a failure, having had my girl in bed but not able to do what she expected, what i expected. From the high of unbounded young love I had landed back into my normal self: a shy and nerdy kid.

And around that time a woman came to visit my brother and his wife, an older woman, a very high spirited, pretty, sexy woman. She took an immediate shine to me, I assumed she saw me as a nice plaything. And feeling lost, I was more than happy to play that role.

So she flirted with me and in no time took me into the bedroom and guided me through how it works with a man and a woman. 

Yes, the next day after failing with my first love, i was brought up to speed by this grown woman. The boy who was a few days past his first kiss was now spending hours making love.

She took me to her apartment for that night and for a snack we had a can of mandarin oranges. And this with the words of Judy Collins singing Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne rolling through my mind. “She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China…”

But this is all mixed up and swirling around because the name of the girl that I had fallen in love with and failed in bed, was… Suzanne.

After I got back home I tried to connect with Suzanne but we were no longer free agents wandering the campus, we were kids under the strict eye of parents. The magic was gone.

And worse, I suspected that the wonderful woman who had actually taken me in and guided me into that part of manhood… I suspected that she might have given me a dose of venereal disease. I had a little red spot that worried me.

And i assumed that that grown lady had no further plans for me, that I was just her plaything for those two days. 

But she came to live with me in college a few years later, which is a whole other story.

At my last sad goodbye to Suzanne after our miserable weekend – under my mother’s thumb – came to and end, we drove her to a train for her trip home. The station she was going to was called Clarksville. So the last of the songs that framed that time was the current hit by the Monkees, Take The Last Train to Clarksville, which she did. And I sang that song to myself in sadness and defeat.

(Many years later I used to meet with Richard Yates, the novelist, at his favorite bar in Boston and we would chat. I told him the basics of this story and next visit he asked if I had written it yet; he assumed I would be working with him as a writing mentor, a role he played in colleges for years. Sadly I never got around to writing this until decades after Richard had passed away. And one successful attempt to reach Suzanne fifty years later resulted in… nothing.)