The Eigerwand, Part I

In this excerpt from his autobiography my father is again a bachelor, now in mid-60s Seattle. He seems to give little thought to his family while pursuing the life of a Lothario.

I returned to Seattle to await possible job offers and take part in the demise of my marriage. It seemed as if my life was disintegrating, piece by piece. Even my mother, my staunchest ally, was unhappy with the way things were going. With my sister going off to Graduate School at Northwestern in Chicago, she thought she would move up to Seattle. At first this was to enjoy grandmotherhood and to help Mary Ann raise two boys; then it was for the perceived companionship and support I would need. She had finally finished her Master’s degree in Education at UCLA and she believed she could find something to keep her busy in the Northwest.

            I don’t recall all the circumstances surrounding my final break-up with Mary Ann, but it was decided to at least make a trial separation that spring. The boys were told that they were moving southwards—to Carmel, California as it turned out—with their mother for a while. I was to stay on at our leased house, looking for another place, until the owner returned at the beginning of June.

            I was now so broke that there wasn’t the remotest possibility—although I longed to—of going to Cambridge and Europe for the summer. One bright sign emerged: I had been offered a further three year contract by UW, only two short of tenure! That would defer job-hunting for another two years. But then no offer was forthcoming from either Hopkins or Yale; but my friendship with Derek Price at Yale continued apace.

            I enjoyed the life of a 27 year old bachelor professor, but had few friends in the city. One day, after class, I was walking in the University District and I passed by this large glass window fronted coffee house with the weird name Eigerwand on it. It looked dark and somewhat dingy—not unlike all of the coffeehouses of the early sixties.

            As it happened, the Eigerwand came out of the Seattle World’s Fair where, as its first incarnation, it began as The Sleeping Buddha. I believe that its two partners, Joel Eisenberg and Eric Bjornstad, bankrupted it shortly after the closing of the Fair. And somehow some of its contents, barrel-tables, benches, ice-cream freezer, tea pots and tableware, found their way up to the University district.

            Along the Eiger’s walls hung numerous large framed black-and-white photographs illustrating Eric’s more renowned climbs—showing him in crevasses, climbing upside down, etc. Eric was a genius when it came to decoration: burlap (from a bag factory) was the wallpaper, the acoustic tile-looking ceiling was, in fact, egg cartons sprayed with dark brown paint and fire-retardant and the barrels and various utensils came from the old Sleeping Buddha. It was a cozy, friendly place in the University district of a rainy Northwestern city—and a reasonable profit-maker.

            In those days, Eric was an insatiable rock climber, this tended to mean that the Eiger was simply a money-generator to finance his climbing. It also, by way of his waitress-interviewing, a generator of his sexual fodder. This, coupled with his alluring red-finished pot-bellied stove with fire and private table at the back of place, provided Eric with ample companionship.

            Eric and I became acquainted not long after I started coming in. I found him to be intelligent, interesting, and willing to befriend me at a time when I was feeling very much alone. He, in turn, introduced me to other denizens of the place.

            I’m not exactly sure of the circumstances under which I first met Alicia Wheatley, but I believe it was at the Eigerwand, possibly in the company of Deb Das who seemed to be her guru. Alicia was considerably attractive, somewhat intelligent, and soft spoken. She was the daughter of a UW marketing professor. She had been a student, but had decided to experiment with a career in nursing. These were the days of “flower children” and clearly, under the tutelage of Deb Das, Alicia was fast becoming one. I personally think she had seen the film Elvira Madigan one too many times: she liked to wear gossamer summery dresses and drift or glide instead of walk. Alicia never planned anything in advance, she was, to say the least, spontaneous. She was the opposite of “up tight”; you might say, literally, not wound too tightly. But she had a soft, feminine, ethereal quality. She was, in short, lovely.

            About the only thing I remember that I found disturbing in Alicia was her nervousness; she was definitely high strung. Some part of her body was always moving; she could never sit still for long. Also, this was reflected in a pervasive intensity—the strong, committed way she felt about everything. I found her instantly attractive and wanted to possess her. Her hungriness and intensity made me want to possess her. Fortunately for me, she was not up to playing games: if she liked you, she was not difficult to possess—to ‘keep’, perhaps, but not possess.

            I remember that her friendship with a fellow student, Melody Greer, got her interested in theater. Melody was rehearsing for The Fantastics in a University drama production and Alicia was living it all out, vicariously. She sang “Try to Remember” endlessly when we were together. And we did spend a lot of time together. In order to get her to live with me, I had to promise to take her to work at a local hospital every morning around 6:30 a.m. This was the true test of love, as far as I was concerned!

            The only trouble was that Alicia was a bit of a nymphomaniac, so my nights preceding school days were none too restful. Going to bed at midnight, making love until 2 a.m., then getting up at 5:30 to take Alicia to her hospital, then going off to teach. Love, or lust, held it together for a couple of weeks, then it began to drag me down a bit. But Alicia’s physical beauty and feminine intensity held me enthralled.

            I really only clearly remember two events during the relationship. First was the evening I went to a sorority ‘apple-polishing’ dinner and found myself seated next to an imposing fellow Professor, a George C. Scott look-alike who seemed quite the self-impressed rogue. You could tell from his conversation that he wished he was a bachelor some 20 years younger. When I asked him about himself, I was floored to learn that I was seated next to and conversing with Alicia’s father! I tried to keep my cool as he kept prodding me about the love life of a young bachelor professor, and how I was doing with the co-eds—replete with the occasional nudge, nudge, know what I mean? thrown in. I found it embarrassing, because I suspected that, before too long, we would be more formally introduced by his daughter. As it was, I admitted to nothing, although he probed unabashedly. I remember coming home to Alicia that night, and asked her off-handedly to guess who I had dinner with. When I told her father, she went ghostly pale. She knew what a short-tempered bastard he was. When she learned that he hadn’t a clue as to who I really was, vis-a-vis his daughter, she relaxed and enjoyed my little joke.

            The other occasion I now remember vividly, was the weekend that six of us—calling ourselves The Olympic Loving Team—went out for a lustful weekend to the Olympic Peninsula. I can remember Susie, a waitress from the Eiger, who was a pal of mine, and her boyfriend Mark, a New York attorney, Jim Wolcott, his girl Kathy (another Eiger waitress), Alicia and me. There may have been one other couple along. I remember we had planned ahead, filled a cold chest with wine, ice, beer and other beverages. We brought along some pot and a few delicatessen sandwiches.

            We drove over, having taken the Bremerton ferry, and eventually stopped at a Norman Bates-type court motel in La Push, which, next to Humptulips, seemed to be the most appropriately named locale for the Northwest Spring Trials for the Olympic Loving team. We were all marvelously suited to one another and got along fabulously. The pot-smoking got us to playing kiddie card games like Go Fish! and Old Maid, and possibly my invention of 3-D Monopoly—where you can go under the board. We went to bed that night both physically and mentally wiped out. Susie and Mark had one bedroom off a sitting room that was shared by the occupants of a second bedroom (Alicia and I). We left the cold locker on a chair in the sitting room, still with remaining sodas and ice. Sometime during the middle of the night, thirsty from our cannabis and booze, three of us decided to get up and tiptoe into the common room to get something to drink. When it became obvious to each of us (Kathy, Susie, and me) that we were not alone in that darkened room, Susie spoke up, saying not to turn on the light as she was totally naked. When Kathy concurred that she too slept in the altogether and hadn’t a stitch on, I immediately flipped the wall switch to confirm all this and fed my eyes with their pulchritude as they ran squealing back to their respective bedrooms! Alicia was not too happy with my nocturnal activities and admonished me for my insensitivity. Since she did not partake of the weed, nor of much of the booze, she was, in my eyes, not really a full-fledged participant in our group. Had she not been great in the sack, that might have put an end to our relationship even sooner than it did.

            I had had an evening class student named Sharon Sinclair who was about 25 years old, who had quit regular day classes because (a) she needed to earn a living and (b) because she had dreams of being a professional figure skater. She had come up to me after class one evening in an effort to get to know me; in the course of this personal contact she learned that I had once been a figure skater. Her mental/emotional wheels were beginning to hum—rapidly. Clearly, she felt that time was fastly becoming her enemy; she had reached the advanced age of 25 with three years of college and hadn’t found a suitable mate. Her above-average intelligence which, unfortunately, showed a little too much and her above-average looks which were normally a considerable asset had also proved a drawback, in so far as they set her standards a little too high for what was currently available in the male population of Seattle. As a result, Sharon was an aggressive, determined young lady who, once aroused by a suitable quarry, became nearly obsessed.

One consequence is that she was sexually self-aware and used her predilection for nymphomania as a social assault-weapon. Naturally, I found this to be—in addition to the looks, intelligence and agile body—a most appealing attribute. After only two evenings we got into bed together. She was determined to make me feel that it was I who in fact seduced her.

 Indeed, once she got to know me intimately, she presented me with a joke present of some pale blue business cards with: “Peter Vorzimmer, Mind Screwer” printed on them! The only problem with Sharon was that her determination turned to obsession. Where I enjoyed this in the sex department, I found this too constricting to my bachelorhood. She did not possess the comforting warmth of a prospective mate; she seemed as shallow as she was bright; and it seemed to me she offered no long-term prospects as a wife. She was not generally social—perhaps it was a form of insecurity, of not being able to hold on to me in the busy full environment in which I lived. Only very slowly was I able to phase her out of my life, though she embarrassingly hung around the fringes of it at the Eiger, at the University and the University District in general.