Rachel Cline

Word Count 1566

My first boyfriend was Peter Miller Hutcheson. Everyone called him Hutch. I called him Peter, because I thought this gave me some claim on him that all the other people he was then sleeping with didn’t have. We also sometimes called each other “kid.” Hutch was not only liberal with and honest about his sexual favors, he was something we did not then have a label for—a guy with a braid down to his waist, who often wore a skirt, and cavorted with both boys and girls and groups of both. He had a particular thing for redheads and seemed to think I was one, which was news to me—apparently the rug trumps the drapes in such matters.

I’d noticed him right away when he transferred to Oberlin, but we had no classes or friends in common. The first time we spoke was at the movies: he took a seat down the row from me at a screening of Kenneth’s Anger’s “Scorpio Rising,” in which (per IMDB) “a gang of Nazi bikers prepares for a race as sexual, sadistic, and occult images are cut together.” When the lights came back up, Hutch asked me If I wiped tables in the dining hall, which I did. “Why? D’you lose something?” was what I said in reply, even though I totally had a crush on him. I had found the movie a little disturbing. Anyway, it took almost a year for us to speak again, and when we did, we fell in love.

Our first amorous night was spent in the kitchen of the food coop, where I had been washing floors or making tofu or something. Hutch stopped by to chat and wound up making out with me while we leaned on, then somehow climbed into the lap of, the industrial-grade Hobart mixer. When it came time to lie down, he worked me over to the dishwashing machine, also a Hobart, which had an eight-foot long conveyor belt. This kind of antic was typical of Hutch. He was a master of spontaneous invention and a genius with raw materials—the kind of person who could fix a player piano, a movie camera, or a sewing machine without looking at a manual and often without benefit of actual tools. A list of his niche aesthetic interests would go on for pages—he was an enthusiast and a spreader of memes. I gave him a “Pull My Daisy” rubber stamp for his birthday, because that was his graffiti tag—it’s the name of a cult movie by Robert Frank that we both were obsessed with. I came to regret the gift after he left its mark on seemingly every bathroom stall, phone booth, and study carrel on campus.

Not long after that night among the Hobarts, Hutch and I had sex for the first time. It was my twenty-first birthday, but I was a still a virgin. I’ll spare you the grunting, because it’s the logistical details that are actually the best part. After breakfast that morning Hutch blindfolded me and put me in a car, then drove to a mysterious destination outside of town where I was led, still blindfolded, onto a small prop plane. (We were both utterly broke then, not to mention carless; I have no idea what favors or labors Hutch performed to cause all this to occur.) He took off my blindfold when we were looking down on our little midwestern town from so far up it looked like a board game. He then coached me into taking the controls for a minute or two. I’d had no aspiration to fly--as a New York City kid, I could not even drive; bumper cars made me panicky. But this was just Hutch being Hutch. (A dozen or so years later, he taught me to drive my first actual vehicle, a Honda Civic with standard transmission, for which he was also my first-line mechanic.)

Back in 1977, freshly 21 years old, I went to bed perfectly happy and was awakened at around two a.m. by a tapping at my dorm window. It was Hutch. He had scaled the outside of the three-story building, but not empty handed--he’d brought his de-virginizing kit! In it was a large shaker of baby powder, a plastic container of freshly assembled fruit salad, and a white silk parachute. He carried me down the hall to the bathroom where a hot bubble bath waited ready, ringed by lighted candles. In this bath, we fucked, and then he fed me the fruit salad. Back in my room, he salted the two of our bodies thoroughly with talc and wrapped us up in a cocoon of silk, so we could slide together, frictionless, for as long as we liked.

I didn’t realize at first how many of the names Hutch often mentioned, male and female, were both his friends and his lovers. With one of the girls (we were girls, then!) he had a standing agreement that if he brushed her hair for half an hour she would give him oral sex. At the vegetarian co-op where he kept his belongings in a janitor’s closet, he figured out how to create a Roman bath in the gang shower and invited anyone and everyone to slither in and enjoy each other’s company. He also led nude night swimming parties (he had a secret key to the college’s Olympic-size swimming pool), climbing expeditions to the roofs of various neo-Rennaissance buildings, and literally slept around--he never paid rent or had an assigned dorm room. He had sex with all the women I then called my friends (and still do), including two or three then-avowed lesbians.

Why did I allow this? I believed Hutch and I had something special, is one reason; Another is that I had very low expectations for monogamous relationships, based on the behavior I’d observed among my parents and their friends; a third is that his universal desirability seemed to burnish my own reputation: He could have anyone, and yet I was his true love… at least until he took a semester off and started waxing poetic in letters about a redheaded librarian he’d nicknamed Cloud. Nothing was ever the same after Cloud blew in, though Hutch and I did stay friends.

Directly after college, Hutch went to Cali, Colombia to teach Math at a private boys’ school. This was not quite at the height of the eponymous Cartel, but almost. Before leaving the states, he plaited up his still hip-length hair into twenty or so tiny braids and, at a party called just for the occasion, had his friends ceremonially cut these off one by one. Those of us too far away to attend were sent a dismembered braid in the mail, along with photos and a press release: “Hutch severs ties with associate of twelve years.” When he returned from Cali, eighteen months later, he managed to smuggle back a half-kilo of uncut cocaine, most of which he literally gave away on New Year’s Day 1982. Stopped in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, he handed the still largely full baggie of white powder to a passenger in a random carful of revelers who had come to a stop in the next lane. “Happy New Year!” he said.

For a while we both lived in Los Angeles, where Hutch threw elaborate outdoor brunches at the ramshackle cottage a block from Hollywood Boulevard where he and his friend Probyn more or less squatted while he completed his Masters degree. He liked to perform short-order cooking feats using the industrial griddle, waffle iron, barbecue, and deep-fat fryer he had scavenged from various refuse piles. The platoon-worthy quantities of fruit salad on offer were made from salvaged, nearly expired fruit. He also became adept at yoga during this period—long before one could buy a foam mat at Wal-mart or recognize a Sanskrit Om inked on some passersby’s ankle. His master’s thesis was a short film called “Yoga in the Buff” that, in addition to showing Hutch and other naked people dangling their privates in broad daylight in Century City, explored themes of reincarnation, sexual frustration, and civil war reenactment.

Finally, Hutch secured a tenure-track teaching job in Miami, Florida. There, he had a pool to swim in, other yoga enthusiasts to contort with, and an equipment cage full of filming and editing machines that required significant amounts of spit and rubber bands to keep functional. He was less sexually indefatigable by then, but I don’t think he ever lacked for redheads. It would all have been perfect except that he drowned, in a swimming pool, in broad daylight with plenty of people around, in the spring of 1999. He was found under the tarp that was covering a portion of the pool—he'd died there, despite being an expert swimmer with the lung capacity of a dolphin. 

For a long time I just couldn't believe it; no one who’d known him could. We filled a book with remembrances of Hutch’s wild enthusiasms and crazy exploits and with our own gratitude and grief. There are probably other women who can claim to have lost their virginity to his enthusiastic ministrations, but I had only one first love. That he was also my first lover--the one to pull my daisy--was one of the luckier breaks of my life. I miss you Peter. I loved you, Kid.

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 Rachel's most recent novel is The Question Authority. On Killing Mom is an excerpt from a longer piece that she will probably never stop rewriting.