Love’s Illusions

The first of what I hope will be a series of stories revealing how Hutch comes to be Hutch. In this one, we see what might have made a younger Hutch receptive to the dubious charms of Vanessa.

From the time he was a young man and had his place in the locker-room pecking order all figured out, Ken Hutchinson had approached sex with the kind of confidence projected only by madmen or the very well-hung. He’d grown up with his expectations so far ahead of reality that preliminary words of seduction usually got tangled in his mouth. He passed that off as barefoot charm and it almost always worked. Once “in,” he never found himself at a loss for what to say, or exactly how to say it. It was when he reached for a more magical communion with someone special that he got himself into trouble. Like the poets he re-read at such times, trouble inspired his best work, but also like most of those poets, his mastery came at a cost, payable from a dwindling supply of hope.

The trend had started at the end of his junior year in college, with Connie.

So, she was pregnant. Oh boy.

His? Probably. Not sure. She was insisting on an abortion. Catholic, so that surprised him. But she told him that night, between tears and sarcastic laughter, that she’d been brought up fearing pregnancy as the worst thing that could happen to an unmarried girl. Was it any wonder she treated the news of his maybe baby as if it were a diagnosis of cancer? The fetus might as well have been a tumor, something modern medicine could take out, and that’s what she was determined to do. She wanted round-trip plane fare to Montreal, $300 for the gynecologist a girlfriend told her would do it, a room at the Queens Hotel where he would actually do it, cash for room service, taxis and whatever else she might need to get by until she arrived back, cured. Would he meet her at the airport and drive her back to the dorm?

Where was the poetry for that one?

“Isn’t there someplace here you could go to?” he’d asked her, his eyes all full of optimism and dread. Oh, that was real knight-in-shining-armor talk, Hutchinson. “What about your family? They’d understand. They’ll help you.” He’d done a little better with that , but too late, because she’d said:

“They didn’t get me pregnant.”

“But…you said…I thought you were on the pill.”

“You kidding? You have to be married or they won’t even talk to you about it.”

“How could you not tell me?”

“I thought it was my safe time. I read in this marriage manual when I was baby sitting one time, that the best time to do it was two weeks after your last…well, you know. They were Catholics, though, so I guess it meant the best time to get pregnant. What difference does it make now, anyway?”

“The difference it makes is a baby! A human life! Maybe my son! Or daughter. A child, anyway. I have to tell you I’m not ready for this, but if I have to get ready, I will, I –”

“Are you saying you want us to get married?”

“No! What? No!”

“Then what? Set me up? Drop in once in a while on your way home to whatever nice girl you do marry someday?”

“Connie, please, I’m sorry—”

“Look, Ken. Let’s be grownups about this. It happens. It’s no big deal. I’m only nine weeks. I’ll get it done and that’ll be that. We can still be friends. We graduate next year. I’m not letting this ruin my life, or yours.”

He looked at her as if he’d never seen a woman before. And, of course, he hadn’t.

He bargained with his father for the money, gave it to her, and she went and did it. It had cost him the respect of his family and the chance to finish his degree.

He never saw her again.

That summer, at the California commune he dropped into for the hell of it and maybe some peace, he used to think about the kid. There were couples there with children. Mostly, they annoyed him. Ran around half naked doing anything they felt like doing while their spaced-out parents did likewise. He’d thought at least he could look forward to losing himself in some “easy rider” sex. What he’d found instead were chicks who considered shaving themselves an act of cowardice, and who expressed their bravery by bathing only under full moons, in a sad little creek, with each other.

So he took his guitar out to the Snake Tree, so named because of the several long snake skins that always hung from its enormous branches. It was eerie, but had the advantage of providing the one spot on the property that was usually private. In the shelter of that tree, he built up the calluses of his fingertips until some sort of new tune emerged from them. Under what he imagined were the hidden eyes of snakes with their own agendas for renewal, he could forget the past, ignore the present, and maybe prevent the future.

One thing he vowed after a couple of months under the Snake Tree was that whatever his future held, it would include neither communes nor commitments. He’d had it with the irresponsibility of the former and had learned that the latter demanded much more of other people than he could trust them to provide in exchange for what he was willing to give. So. Maybe he’d continue on down to LA and let some gorgeous babe give him money in exchange for his grief. That’d be a switch. And no näive fuck-ups like Connie. He would set his sights on a girl — no, a woman — who knew exactly what she wanted out of life and how to get it, and she would not be taking her inspiration from Catholic marriage manuals or Mother Earth News.

So, with the address for this guy Luke in his pocket and his guitar in the back seat of his sister’s cast-off Fairlane, he slipped his aviators over his pretty blue eyes and headed south.