Love, Fetish & Manipulation (Take 1)

I was not sure what to call this entry. Really wanted to give it a clever name, because it is an important milestone in the history that I am attempting to relate to you. I chose the title you see above because I think, unfortunately, that manipulation was at the very core of the first relationship that I had which truly involved the fetish.

Here, again, I want to be careful to focus on the details that matter to my real story, rather than tell you a little fetish "blurb". And that's not to say that I'm not tempted to go there. I remember, reading the forums on LH's website, where people would post their real-life or fictional stories. Some of them were horribly cheesy, and others were exquisite. But again, I'll come back to LH later. In fact, it will be about 6 years ahead in this history.

So. After all of the bullshit of high school, and the girls at the pizza place, and the flea markets, and the movies, and magazine ads, and all other things that had stimulated my brain and my sexual organs for the first 17 years, I went to college. I went to a large state school. And I really did not know what the hell I was doing. I was not particularly mature or self-sufficient at 17 years old (turned 18 a month into my first year).

In another realm, sexuality, I was also not particularly mature. I was still a virgin. But within about 12 days of my arrival at the university, that cherry had been picked.

My college dormitory was in a 17 story tower. I had a corner room. And corner rooms had a unique feature to them. These rooms jutted out of the ends of the building, such that the windows of each pair of corner rooms were facing one another. You could see into the room across from you. One night, I was in my room, probably during the first week of college. And I look out my window of the 10th floor, I think it was. Or maybe the 11th floor. And across from me, and one floor down, there is a girl with curly blonde hair sitting on her desk and smoking. She's laughing and talking with friends. At some point later, either that day, or the next, or the next, I was in my room at night, alone, and saw her down there again. The lights were out in my room, and I was watching her. And I am pretty sure that I masturbated while watching her. What a nice Peeping Tom I was. God. Forward another day or so, and I am sitting in my room in the daytime, looking out the window, and she (LC) is in the window and she sees me, and yells up to me and says hello. Somehow we start to talking, and she ends up inviting me down to talk some more. That had to have been September 5th, 1986 because I recall that as being the day we met. And we pretty much immediately became inseparable. One of those deals where it's so inseparable that it makes everyone else either sick or uncomfortable. One week later, LC became the first girl I slept with. Sadly, I was not the first guy she had slept with, which would not be a big deal, except for the fact that later in the relationship (when her little sister discovered her birth control pills), we both got in huge trouble, and it ended up being me who was chastised (pun intended) for stealing their daughter's innocence. And, of course, I could not blurt out "But it wasn't me!"

Back to the point. The smoking story.

So, LC was going to be my girlfriend, obviously. But I couldn't date a smoker. So, I had to try to get her to quit smoking. She smoked Newports, in case you're curious. The reason she did was because her aunt did, and I guess she looked up to her aunt. I don't really know how much she smoked, but it couldn't have been very much, maybe 5 or 6 a day or fewer, would be my recollection. Nonetheless, I needed to make her stop. So I was pressuring her, and asking her about it, and wanting her to tell me all about why she did it. But, as you can clearly guess, I was getting really turned on talking to her about it, in spite of the fact that my words were supposedly words of discouragement. The fact was, I had friends at school with me, and I could not have them think I was dating a smoker, because I was way too uncomfortable with that. They probably would have made one comment about it, and then let it go. But I couldn't handle it.

After much prodding and pressure, LC agreed to quit. This was probably only a week or so after we started dating. And what happened next was the beginning of an elaborate "dance" that lasted pretty much the entire relationship. Whenever LC would get upset with me, she would want to smoke because, in her mind, the only reason she had stopped was "for me". So if I pissed her off, she would smoke. We had a reasonably volatile relationship, so this turned out not to be infrequent. And what happened next, which I alluded to in the title of this blog, is that I realized that I could get her to smoke by instigating a fight. Ugh. Not a good dynamic. But incredibly effective. And it would go back and forth like this. I would fight over nothing, and be completely irrational. She would get fed up and start smoking. And suddenly, I would stop being difficult, and we'd make up. Over and over and over.

One tiny little detail out of this story. I cannot remember if this relates to the first such "fight" of these incidents, or a subsequent one. But I vividly remember one night where I had really pissed her off, and she had said she wanted to smoke. But she did not have cigarettes. So she need to go buy them. This was back when college campuses still sold them in machines. And I remember following her out of the dorm, in the night, in the cold. She was storming across the courtyard, on the 5 minute walk to the commons building that had the vending machines. I was continuing to fight with her, but also pressuring her not to go through with it (though, of course, I wanted desperately for her to do it). We got to the building, and she purchased the cigarettes. By this point, I think the fight had subsided, especially or at least partly due to the fact that I'd given in to the desire to indulge the fetish. And it was this night, sitting in the lobby of that building, that she "taught" me how to smoke properly. I had never actually done it right before, and had not done it at all for many years, probably since those experimentations of ages 12-14. LC was the one who told me not to try to breathe it in, but to first suck it into my mouth, and then inhale. And I remember feeling like I had "learned" something from her. And it made the fetish a bit more powerful, and also made the bond with her a little stronger. But in hindsight, I think that night was probably the closest we ever became, because that was the big opportunity to come clean and I don't think I did it.

For the entire first year of college, we went back and forth, with her stopping and then starting. And us fighting a lot. Some very big fights. I do not even remember if I told her that I had a fetish. But I think I might have eventually. Because I remember there coming a turning point where I would ask her to smoke for me. Or with me. But I was always very controlling of it. The fetish was mine. And I did not want to lose control over it. I don't know how to put it better than that. I didn't know how to communicate honestly about the feelings around it. So instead, I would manipulate. It's surprisingly a bit fuzzier of a memory than I thought it would be. Selective amnesia perhaps. I remember doing it together a bit. In fact, during that relationship was probably when I almost did it enough to develop a tolerance for it. But of course, always in private, except around LC's one roommate, who was sort of allowed in on the secret (probably way more than she wanted to be a part). I remember only one time where I did it with her in a completely public place. It was near the cafeteria in the student union building, at an area where people would sit. But it was in the evening, so there was not much traffic through there. I don't know why, but it was some reason we were on campus, and I remember it being both a rush, and a bit scary to be doing it in public. I do think I remember specifically wanting her to do it in public at that time. And I also remember that we fought about it, since we fought about everything. During that relationship I also started manipulating her about what brand she was smoking. Wanting her to smoke lighter cigarettes. Then wanting her to smoke all-white cigarettes. Strange, because that was a very short-lived interest, and then it was back to finding the Marlboro to be the sexiest thing. I don't know what was going on in my head, but maybe it was just about manipulating. Making her do it for me, instead of for herself.

I don't think I learned anything positive from that encounter, when it comes to the fetish. I don't know if it was a Dark Ages, or a Renaissance. It was most definitely an indulgence, without honesty, sensitivity, or understanding. And it pretty much set a pattern for a large chunk of the years to come. And it also marks the start of the time period which is going to be harder for me to talk about.