So close together on the sidewalk they almost touched were tables for those people and organizations that could not afford booths.

I almost missed the card table with the sign that read, Meet Market, and when I did see it, I glanced away. Those gay guys, I thought dismissively.

Something compelled me to look again. Maybe it was the two lissome lesbians sitting and smiling at me from behind the Meet Market sign.
The Meet Market, they explained, was a dating service for gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

I thought what’s to lose and filled out the form. It was not an online dating service. Nobody had heard of online dating services because weren’t any, and though the world was on the cusp of the appearance of the personal computer - - I myself had a KayPro word processor - - and though 1984 was the year of the now famous Apple commercial of the woman athlete throwing a javelin at the figure of an Orwellian tyrant, which was revolutionary excitement on a par with that of having the first-ever women’s marathon of the Olympics - - the World Wide Web was still five years away.
So I filled out the paper form with my ballpoint and handed it back. Who knew that a Jenny Wrenn, who had stopped by the Fair on her way home after a day of shooting photographs at the Olympics, was also filling out a form that day?

A couple of weeks later I got a letter from the Meet Market, the Pink Sheet arrived in the mail. It was printed on hot pink paper and started out with the words:
Hi, Carolyn, we’d like to introduce you to Jenny.
At the same time, a few miles away from my apartment in East Hollywood, at her artist’s loft in Highland Park, Jenny opened a letter from the Meet Market, on hot pink paper, that read:
Hi, Jenny, we’d like to introduce you to Carolyn.

We didn’t contact each other until three weeks later because we were shy, and fearful of rejection and bad first dates. We talked on the phone only long enough to agree we neither one wanted to even attempt to chat. That was a plus in both our favors. We set a time and place to meet. On the appointed Sunday, I sat in my car in the parking lot of the French Market, watching for a woman of Jenny’s description to enter, so I didn’t gave to be first. I found out later, she did the same thing, hanging behind on the sidewalk until she was so late she had to steel herself and walk in.

Jenny was an artist, a secretary at TV Guide, and a scholar. She was serious, shy but ironic. I liked her. She took me to one of her rooms to see her installation Funeral Rites and stood by silently as a tape of Jean Genet reciting somber poetry echoed in the hollow room. Then we went to Pier 1 and bought hats.

I told Jenny how in Fort Worth in the bad old days long years ago I used to hang out at Pier 1 because it was the most bohemian place I could find.
We agreed to meet again on Halloween at MONA, in downtown L.A., where Jenny had a neon on exhibit in the multi-artist, wacky, wonderful show.

Her fingernails were painted black. She wanted to talk about literature and philosophy. I was only three months out of the loony bin and sure that whatever came out my mouth was mush. Jenny didn’t think it was mush. She thought it was witty and beautiful, too witty and beautiful for me to like her, so she had better keep up a brittle patter on literature and philosophy. I was scared. Jenny told me later she was scared, too.
But she drove me to my car on her Honda scooter, and we began to take on the world with our two lone wolf selves. Love’s old familiar story, with only minor individual variations, was unfolding.

When I told her about Shallow Practice, my failed endeavor the year before to make myself be shallow, she was appalled and said my deep feelings were beautiful and I was helping her to bring hers forth. She wanted to protect my romanticism. I wanted to protect her with love in her frightening efforts to open up.
With our tentativeness turning into trust, we settled into our Wednesday night routine of chess at the Go-Between.

After a time, I found myself realizing that Jenny was a luscious woman.
Jenny’s eyes sometimes flashed as she glanced at me, something they had not done before.

One night, I stood outside my apartment door and watched Jenny walk towards me down the long hall, and she became sexier and more beautiful with each step.
I audibly gasped.
Jenny’s eyes blazed.
Jenny and I had fallen in love and lust.

So much so that, sitting on the couch, starry-eyed, at our friend, Petie’s house party, magical vibes wafted from us to all the guests, who were mostly strangers to us. The strangers watched us seeming to float through the air. They were drawn to come sit beside us, gay and straight alike, and bask in our glow. We didn’t just imagine it. Petie said later that they had come to her and told her that.

We couldn’t play chess on Wednesday nights at the Go-Between anymore because we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

Even when Jenny and I went hiking in Griffith Park, we headed to a secluded spot and smooched. Suddenly, we heard a tramp-tramping sound which got louder and louder until a troop of about 40 people burst up the ridge and stamped right through our little love place – the Sierra Club.

I couldn’t think what to do, as I looked up at them looking down at me with leaves in my hair and on my clothes, and at Jenny’s unbuttoned blouse.
“My,” I said to them, “this IS a surprise!”
Beet-red Jenny ducked her head and chuckled softly.

At her place on Figueroa in Highland Park, in what we dubbed The Grotto, a small, sumptuous room, decadent with brocade and heavy fringe, and black lacquered Japanese boxes holding cones of incense, I delicately undressed her as we increasingly smoldered, and I saw, beneath her blouse, she wore the red slip, which she knew I loved. It set me boiling, which set her boiling.

Afterwards, Jenny made tea and brought it back to The Grotto in a silver teapot, next to thin china cups, on a wooden tray she had painted with a jolly Santa Claus face, a unusual subject for the edgy Jenny.
“It must be love!” she chirped.

We tried to keep our hands of each other long enough to drink the tea, for if we got our hands on each other, we’d be at it for hours, hours.

When we found ourselves easing back onto the bed, we flayed our arms and shouted, “Oh, no, no!” as though we could stop our inevitable fall off the slick, lush cliff.
We wore satin Chinese embroidered jackets, smooth and milky to our skin. They were short, reaching just to our waists, and when we tied the sashes, the satin cascaded in billows between our breasts.

When Jenny was cast down by an art critic’s careless words, when I lapsed into nihilism because of what I deemed an unintelligible staged reading of my play, we made it better in bed. Whether we were irritable or mellow, dead tired or dancing on air, bed made everything better.

We traveled back and forth between her place, The Grotto in Highland Park and my East Hollywood apartment, five floors up, on Kingsley.
On Kingsley we had sex for eight hours until we could not move but only lie in bed and growl at each other.
Hours later, we managed to get out of bed to go to the kitchen for coffee and sandwiches but started in groping again. I began to lose my balance and meant to say to Jenny that she reach out to the refrigerator and steady us but all I could get out was “Catch the refrigerator.”
Jenny, dazed, said, “Huh? What?”

Our laughing did not diminish our passion or improve our balance, and we rocketed to the floor, still making love, this time with her on top and me on bottom. We worked our way across the kitchen floor and into the hall in a paroxysm of passion. Jenny’s toes were even skinned.

That night we made jokes about the bumps and bruises of love. We might have to go to the hospital and be put in casts if we kept this up. And then imagine trying to carry on with our lustful sessions.
“Ha, ha,” we laughed at the thought of it.

One afternoon, I severely tore a ligament in my ankle at a Richard Simmons aerobics class. The instructor whose fault it was for having the class execute a movement that had been banned for being too dangerous, helped me hop over to the stage and take my shoe off. I lay on my back in the floor, with my aching, rapidly swelling ankle propped on the stage as the show went on. I tried not to grimace and hoped I didn’t stick out too much, as I listened to fifty sets of feet thumping up and down to “Whoo, whoo, whoo, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive!”
After the class over at last, someone took me to the Kaiser Sunset ER. Jenny picked me up there and drove me home on her Honda scooter. I wrapped my arms and crutches around her like batwings around itself.
Shortly after this incident, Jenny’s orthopedic surgeon called and said the time had come for him to remove the metal plate he had placed in her forearm the year before. She had broken it in three places in a pickup crash on Wilshire while she driving to the Tar Pits to shoot photos of dying fiberglass woolly mammoths.
Jenny and I were both in casts.
White, heavy plaster casts.
Clunky casts that made a cracking sound when banged together.
Mine was a walking cast that covered the foot and lower leg and stopped just below the knee, so the knee could be bent and easily smash into, well, Jenny.
Jenny’s was a long arm cast, more unwieldy than mine.
A long arm cast encases the arm from the hand to about two inches below the shoulder, leaving the fingers and thumbs free.
The elbow cannot straighten, and the cast holds the arm in a bent position out from the front and makes it hard to lie on top of someone.
Or under someone.
Or for someone to be under you.
Or atop you.
Rolling to the right so hard.
Rolling to the left hard, too.
And that is only trying to kiss each other on the mouth.
Like a bad country song, Jenny lived out our lustful love with our casted extremities, and we learned that the ordinary bumps and bruises of uncasted lovemaking were small potatoes indeed.
We learned that the possibilities for humor based on a written handout entitled You and Your Cast were limitless.
Cast Instruction #1: For the 48 – 72 hours, elevate the casted extremity above your heart by propping it up on pillows or some other support. You will have to recline if the cast is on your leg.
Cast Instruction #2: Move your uninjured, but swollen, fingers or toes gently and often.
Cast Instruction #3: If your cast should become wet it should be dried with a blow dryer set on a cool setting.
The flame of love, the deep feelings, the thank-god-I’m-no longer-last-in-line-at-the-cafeteria gratitude sometimes overcame all odds and we transcendently ignored the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
But more often than not, as when my walking cast got snagged in the sheet during a crucial maneuver and we bounced so hard laughing I knocked her in the shin with it, or when she whispered Sweetheart and reached for me but instead socked me in the jaw with The Thing on her arm, we had to admit that, yes, it was true, there was a gorilla.
It’s not that anyone else could ignore it either. Even when Jenny and I ventured out to eat - - whether to Gorky’s or Denny’s - - it was always the same. The sideways glances, the whispers.
“Don’t look now, but they’re both wearing casts.”
Jenny, a right-handed artist, was depressed and fearful with her good arm out of commission. She needed to paint something, now!
She painted our casts using her art paints and brushes. Hers she painted blue, yellow and bright red; mine lavender, yellow, and blue. We thought they looked so fine. We got dressed up and posed in another of the Highland Park rooms, the one with chess sets, klieg lights and Jenny’s homemade paper books. We wanted to memorialize our new and lusty love, and if that meant the casts were in the picture, they were in the picture. Besides, they were now art.
Jenny set the scene and the camera, then took her place beside me and pulled the cord to the camera that she held in her good hand behind her back.
She took our photograph as we kissed - - two women in love, lust and casts.

Every Wednesday night, Jenny and I met for chess at the Go-Between coffeehouse.

Jenny lived in a commercially zoned, cavernous space in Highland Park, one floor above several small shops. It was divided into small rooms off larger rooms and cubbyholes off the small rooms. In one these rooms, Jenny wrote across the walls in acrylics the titles of books as she finished reading them.

At the time we met, she was reading Origen, the only person I had met who did that for fun. My mother did algebra for fun, but having a math-loving nature was thought of as being solid and sensible, not quirky. I wasn’t reading Origen, but I did dip into the Venerable Bede from time to time, for fun. Jenny was amazed that I didn’t think she was crazy. Not one bit. And she didn’t think I was crazy either.

1984 was the year Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics. Jenny and I met because of the Olympics and the annual Sunset Junction Street Fair taking place at the same time. This was the first Olympics to include a women’s marathon. The excitement of that, and of the Olympics taking place in your own town crackled through the city like St. Elmo’s Fire, the exact way it the way it had crackled through Fort Worth in 1966 for the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, when every store window on the street had a TV in it showing the as-it-is-happening piano concerto smackdowns.

The dehydrating heat of August had people crowding the cold beer, ice cream and frozen Margarita joints. Or splatting water balloons instead of confetti eggs over people’s heads at the Sunset Junction Street Fair in Echo Park, that congenial mix of largely Hispanic family groupings, the hip, the funky, the artsy-fartsy, the gay.