ecch

I was napping this afternoon, and had a dream about someone really horrible, though in the dream he was quite nice. In the dream, I was cheating on Barry with M., who was very hot and also very sweet.

In real life, M. date-raped me in the early 80s. He was someone I met in college. We had quite a few mutual friends, and I always admired him and wanted to be friends with him, but he was never nice to me. In fact, he was unpleasant to me from the first day we met, which was my first week at college, at an activities fair. He was manning the table from the college radio station, something I really wanted to do. He said that you had to take an exam to be on the air, and the closest place to take the exam was in Syracuse. Having no car, I asked if the station might arrange for a group of people who needed to take the test to go together. He said, "Well, I'm not doing that!" It seemed to me that he was trying to discourage or block new people from coming on; he was certainly not inviting. A few weeks later, I was in the student center, where they piped in music from the station, and someone was playing a song by one of my favorite bands, one so obscure I never imagined I'd hear them on any radio station, even a college one. I decided I had to go to the station (which was in the same building) and shake the hand of whoever had such good taste. It turned out to be a guy named Ron, who was about the sweetest guy in the world and who eventually became my first lover at college ("boyfriend" doesn't exactly describe it, though we were always close). He made the station seem much more available. The first step was to "apprentice" to one of the current DJs, which meant sitting in when he/her did their show, and presumably the DJ would teach the newbie how to run the board and such. Rather stupidly, I chose to apprentice with M., because I loved his taste in music and his show (despite having played my favorite obscure band, Ron's taste was basically the Grateful Dead and space jazz, neither of which were my thing at the time, though I eventually did get to like the Dead). M. was nasty the couple of times I sat in with him, and I did end up apprenticing with Ron.

Once I had a circle of friends from the station, many of whom were friends with M., I reached out to him and he was still unpleasant to me.

Fast forward to 1981 or 82, in Brooklyn. My then-boyfriend and I went to see a band at a club in Brooklyn, and there was M., DJing between band sets. I still admired him for some reason, and still wanted to be friends, so we exchanged phone numbers. He called me once, and soon turned the conversation to sex talk -- I believe he started by asking me if I liked to wear lingerie. I didn't care for this and was faithful to my boyfriend, but somehow we got in touch again during my next single period, and he invited me to visit.

He tried to feed me a lot of liquor (I drank some), and then he went after me. It was forced, in a way that terrified me. He did poppers, too. Afterward, he walked me to a train (I'm not quite sure how or why that happened), and we ran into a very beautiful woman who he told me he dated, emphasizing how beautiful she was and I wasn't.

Fortunately, that was my last encounter with M., almost 30 years ago. Why exactly he popped up in my dream, and why now, is a total mystery. I'm also wondering why he seemed so nice and so sweet in the dream, when the reality was that he was never nice and frequently awful to me over the seven or so years from our first encounter to the last.

I'm thinking now that it might have something to do with V., someone I considered very nice and sweet for a lot of years, but who proved to be selfish and narcissistic, and had a taste for mock-rough sex, though never anything remotely close to what M. did. V. was more of a role-player than a psycho/sociopath. M. was a really sick guy, and maybe still is.

Ron, I invited to my wedding. He's still the "grand old man" at the radio station, or was ten years ago, even though he must be pushing 60. He was older even back then -- he worked for the university, and took a course around once every couple of years, just to keep student status. And he was a maniac about music, had thousands and thousands of records of all types, and made hundreds of numbered mix tapes that he sent to his friends (I received them for years after I moved away). I only every saw him less than sunny once, and it was actually when someone walked in on us when we were in bed together. Well, it wasn't quite "bed" -- he was between apartments for a short time, and slept in the engineering studio at the station. So we were more like "in sleeping bag." And walk-ins were always a possibility. But he did get cranky with the woman who walked in. That was the sole time I saw him in anything like a bad temper. Ron took me to a lot of concerts, loved to smoke dope and eat, and gave great head. Too bad I didn't dream about him.