It was strange for me to realize, but considering the variety and sheer number of sexual experiences I’d had in the two years since I'd lost my virginity to Yarn Man, my relationship with Nancy—that is to say, Agatha—was the closest thing to a normal, dating relationship I’d ever had. This was due, in part, to her being a civilian—as opposed to being a megahero or former megahero. But it was more because most of the sex I’d had up to that point in my life had been impromptu hook-ups: I shagged Yarn Man the moment I’d laid eyes on him, and later we shacked up in the basement rec room my Daddy built and seldom went out thereafter. That summer, when I became Ms. Megaton Man, I spent a couple of weeks binge-partying with every college athlete on the Arbor State University campus—male or female—just before the fall semester of my repeat junior year began. At the very end of the school year, I finally did it with Trent, whom I had gotten to know from living in the same house as him over the previous two and a half years; we certainly had never gone out on a date.

When I first ran into Nancy at the museum, it wasn’t a date-date, but at least we did something cultural before we went back to her place to look at her art and make out. Just kissing, come to think of it, was about the least far I’d ever taken a first romantic encounter since I’d become sexually active. Then she came over to my place, and all we did was finger each other—well, I fingered her, then I fingered myself. After my tumble with Nuke, I found the drawing table she left in the hallway—she was thoughtful enough to include one of those old-school padded stools and the kind of folding-arm lamp you clamp onto the table—I felt like a real draftsman—except I needed a lightbulb. After I assembled the whole thing, which I did still naked, I took a bath—mostly to wash Nuke’s dried cum off my body—then got dressed and gave her a call. I figured enough time had elapsed for her to have walked all the way home.

She answered the phone and she wasn’t angry or anything, but it took a while before I got her talking. We talked for hours—again, another first—about boys and first kisses and first sexual experiences at summer camp and all sorts of stuff. I never had my own phone on Ann Street—there was one down in the kitchen by the hallway, but I’d only used it to call my family back in Detroit. And I never used the one at my parents’ house—my sister Avie was always on it, talking to her friends, and boyfriends. So, here I was, in my own apartment, looking at my very own drawing board I had no use for other than a desk, and a lamp that needed a light bulb, fully clothed and lying on my bed, having my first, personal conversation with somebody I cared about and was getting to know her mind.

Of course, Nancy had heard everything that transpired between met and Nuke from the hallway, or at least enough, and didn’t want to interrupt. I guess it also broke her heart—hearing me moaning and groaning with another lover—a man—but she wouldn’t admit it. She didn’t have to say it. I told her I was so sorry and I really was—aside from being embarrassed I would never want to hurt another person like that. She said it was no big thing and that she was seeing a guy at the new restaurant she was working at anyway—which kind of hurt me. So I guess we were even. We both cried—I told her I wanted to hug right that very minute and she told me the same thing back—and to make a long story short, we decided we still wanted to be friends. We made plans to go out the following weekend and do something cultural. This meant breaking off my usual cinematic foray with Avie; I didn’t want it to be too friendly—that is to say, platonic, with my sister tagging along. I wanted there to still be an element of a date, and at least the possibility of more. In any case, Avie was cool with it; she had some theater stuff to go to with her friends anyway.

We grabbed a bite to eat and went to some kind of contemporary art installation thing, and it was all very platonic. Except when I dropped her off at her apartment I kissed her goodnight a bit too passionately—she was about the best French kisser I’d ever known, and I could feel she wanted to, but under the circumstances it was too soon. But thereafter, Nancy and I went to a lot of art galleries and happenings and cultural events around town, and ate at some really great restaurants: Greektown, Old Chinatown, Little Italy, the Mexican Village by Corktown. She had this goofy old Federal Motors van that had been a delivery truck that she used to haul her bigger art stuff, and we used it to tool all over town. Once the fall season kicked in, we attended Ron’s urban poetry reading on open-mike night at Ty’s First Base and even more gallery shows at the colleges and near Harmony Park. I left out Ditty in the City—I’ll talk about that later.

Avie started to come along on my outings with Nancy—she’s the one who broke the ice with Nancy’s roommates Audrey and Hadleigh; we all kind of formed a group. Avie’s irrepressible—she had to share her drawings and sketchbooks with Nancy, so they really hit it off. Later in September, after the fall semester had begun, we planned a kind of just-girls cookout picnic in the back yard of Nancy’s duplex—except that Audrey brought her black boyfriend, Wilton, a whiz-bang engineering student, and Hadleigh brought her boyfriend Chip, who was going to Cranbrook. Avie even brought a guy from her theater world, a tall, skinny part-Cambodian, part-Zimbabwean who was a grad student at Warren Woodward who called himself Zephyr. That left me and Nancy as the only just-girls part of the equation, and a default couple, and we had a really pleasant time.

Audrey and Hadleigh had set up the stereo speakers on the back stairs, and the record changer played the Police, the B-52s, Michael Franks, Morris Day and the Time—clearly Audrey’s eclectic sensibility, since Hadleigh listened only to power-pop ballads like Peter Cetera. When Audrey’s selections ran out, Nancy disappeared, and Joan Armatrading came on, and Nancy reappeared and took my hand, right in front of everybody, and nobody paid any particular attention. It was getting dark out and cool, and we put on our jackets and huddled around the embers of the grill and roasted marshmallows. That’s when I knew Nancy was ready to try being more than friends again. The funny thing is that after that evening, Chip and Zephyr became a couple and we seldom ever saw them again. But us girls and Wilton formed a small circle of friends; I got so used to hanging out with them I got to thinking of myself as a regular civilian and almost forgot I was a megahero.

The point is that Nancy and I had gotten to know each other as friends over the late summer and into the fall semester before we tried being lovers again, and even then, we had gone at it pretty slowly—or at least at a normal pace, which for me had hitherto been unheard of. Nuke of course was entirely out of the picture—he’d long since gone off to California, presumably—and Nancy had never been all that into the guy from her restaurant. This left her and I wide open to try being romantic again. And it was no big thing; there wasn’t any rush, nor any pressure. One evening, I invited her over to my place—we didn’t want to be too in your face with Audrey and Hadleigh just yet. Nancy was delighted to see me using the drawing board she’d given me. I had gotten a lightbulb, of course, and kept the table top level; three weeks into September it was already covered with my textbooks and portable typewriter and mountains of homework. She also loved the shag rug I had gotten, and the feeling of it under her bare feet when she took her socks off, compared to the cold linoleum.

Even though we weren’t by any means new to one another, we were both kind of butterflies about finally really doing it again, for the first time. It meant more to both of us because we had built up to it, and we were both happy with where we were.

“This is kind of silly,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and laughed.

We took off each other’s clothes and sat next to each other on the bed and kissed and touched each other’s tops. Then, I knelt before her and spread her legs and smelled her. I told her lay back on my bed. I ate her out for almost half an hour; she came so many times I stopped counting. Finally, she took her turn on me—I had douched myself really good all afternoon so as not to be overwhelming—but she still gagged. Like I told you, I don’t think she was all that experienced. She apologized and said she always had an involuntary gag reflex; she thought she’d overcome it but sometimes it came back. I told her it was all right and lifted her up on the bed. That’s when she surprised me—she for the big shoulder bag she’d brought along and whipped out an assortment of dildos—I had never seen so many sex toys in one place. It shouldn’t have surprised me. She was a tool person with an arsenal of art supplies; why wouldn’t she approach sex—as a form of creative expression—in the same way? It was a new experience for me, to say the least; I didn’t even own my own vibrator.

Nancy could have had a career just selling adult novelties door-to-door, she was so good at demonstrating them. After she got me off I don’t know how many times with some egg thing, we finally settled on a dildo for me and one for her. She worked them both, one in each hand—just like I had fingered us both before. It crossed my mind that her reliance on appliances was a bit of a defense mechanism—she didn’t feel comfortable enough to confront lovemaking with another woman directly, flesh-to-flesh, so to speak. But that was okay; man, she had a good technique with those things. After that, we lay on opposite ends of the bed, our legs entwined, and we just dildoed ourselves. I was leaning against the pillows against the wall, but I couldn’t come again, I was afraid she was going to fall off the other end and into my milk crates. She did fall off the bed, sideways onto the rug—coming again at the same time. It was a bit undignified and she was embarrassed, but she told me she’d never been able to come like that in front of another person, so it had been a breakthrough.

Afterwards, we got dressed. She said I could keep the dildo, and we shook hands like she’d made a sale. I went to hug her but she didn’t even seem to want to make eye contact. “I’m really glad you like the drawing able” was all she said. Then she grabbed her bag and left. Weird artists.

I never could use the dildo on myself the way she could. She also left me a vibrator, too, or at least had forgotten it; I noticed it on the milkcrate next to my books after she had left. I completely fell in love with that—where had this marvelous device been all my life?

When I sat down to do my homework, long into the night, I looked at the pocket calendar I kept on hand. I still had one from the year before; I kept both together with a rubber band, most because of some information in the address book section I didn’t feel like copying to the new one. As I flipped through both, I tried to recall the sex I’d had since losing my virginity. I never marked anything like that down, of course, but I realized in a short eighteen months I had probably caught up with my little sister who had been sexually active for years longer.

“I need to cool it,” I said to myself. I looked over at the dildo and vibrator lying on my bed. I figured I had the tools I needed. Sex didn’t stop being important in my life. But from that point on, it stopped being such a noteworthy thing.

Nancy and I would continue to see each other and remain passionate friends. A big breakthrough came when I could sleep over with her in her bedroom in the front of the apartment, and Audrey and Hadleigh didn’t even bat an eyelash when they saw me the next morning in my jammies at the breakfast table. We even went out for apple cider and doughnuts together at every mill in southeastern Michigan—me and Nancy, Audrey and Wilton, and Hadleigh and Avie going stag. Nancy even got good at oral sex—she at least overcame her involuntary gag—and became really enthusiastic about sixty-nine. But we weren’t exclusive. I had a feeling this tacit understanding would lead to jealousy somewhere down the line, but I wasn’t worried about that now. We had our circle of friends and we had a whole city to fuck, and the fall semester wasn’t even over yet.

If I can pull back and talk about this period of my life in general, my love life in Detroit turned out to be a lot more normal than the rocky start I had had in Ann Arbor. There, I had tried to make up for lost time and do everything at once, and being Ms. Megaton Man, I almost could. Here, I felt more at home—I’m sure it had to do not only with being among friends who were civilians but being around a lot more colored people—and I fell into a series of more or less serially monogamous relationships. At least, they felt monogamous when they were happening.

My close friendship and frequent love affair with magenta-haired Nancy was by far the greatest fixture of my final undergraduate school year. She lived over on John R by the art school, an recently had gotten her tongue pierced—I don’t know how she could stand the pain, but the stud on her tongue made up for whatever she lacked in oral technique. She also had me pose in the nude for her while she drew me in charcoal—she was pretty good, and I had the weird experience of seeing myself hung in an art show at the end of the semester. I had just done this privately, in her studio-slash-bedroom, but one of the creepy older white professors told me he’d be happy to have the school hire me. I said no thanks although it would have been lucrative and easy—with my megapowered musculature, I found I could hold even awkward poses for long stretches without getting tired.

I did see other people—I may tell you about some of them later. But a lot of my relationships at the time seemed to center on one or another sex act. It seemed that whenever I met someone, after some initial trial and error, we would only do more or less one thing—oral, anal, this position, that position, whatever--thereafter. Wherever our particular enthusiasms seemed to intersect, that’s what we stuck with. Occasionally, a partner or I would want to try something new, but we seldom found it as satisfying, so we stuck with the tried and true. It got to the point where I could tell exactly what I wanted from a partner the moment I laid eyes on the, and went straight for it. I almost always guessed right. But it also meant that I would get tired of partners more quickly. It was like having that thing you always ordered when you went to that particular restaurant and ignoring the rest of the menu. And when you got tired of that thing you were through with that restaurant, without ever trying the rest of the menu.

Some of these relationships lasted only for a few encounters or for a few weeks; some were less frequent and more intermittent, but lasted longer. I usually had more than one thing going at any given time, so I’m probably stretching the meaning of the term serial monogamy—it felt more like a symphony of interwoven melodies, with each voice having various tempos, polyrhythms, and chords. One theme—one lover—might happen only once every ten days, another every two weeks; some might last a whole weekend or recur three weeks apart. Some relationships were just four nights in a row, then so long.

Despite this, I never felt like a one-night-stand kind of girl, at least after my brief orgy phase in Ann Arbor—Samson being the outlier in those days. True, I’d only done it the once with Trent in Ann Arbor, but I had a feeling Megaton Man and Ms. Megaton Man had a much longer-term connection—not to get ahead of myself. But Nancy was my most constant relationship, at least for my final undergrad year of college in Detroit. The point is I had a surprising amount of love in my life, and I didn’t have to work at it or think much about it, like you read about some of those more morose and neurotic megaheroes. I was very lucky in that regard. And except for the criticism that I was a slut or a nymphomaniac—which I admit I allowed to get into my head—it didn’t cause a lot of personal strife. My love life seemed to unfold without too much conflict.

I don’t imagine I broke many hearts, either—besides Samson, whose debut on syndicated daytime television was accompanied by the announcement of his engagement to a big-titted blonde. She had curves that made Stella Starlight look skinny. Call me solipsistic, but I always thought he was overcompensating for me, which I found amusing. Not that I was heartless, but I never took romance all that seriously during my college years. If I learned nothing else in Ann Arbor, I took away one important lesson from Stella’s relationship with Trent: that there was no necessary relationship between sex, friendship, or partnership—let alone reproduction. All of these were completely separable, or they could be combined, mix and match—it was completely up to the person and the situation. I’m glad I learned this lesson early. In any case, I had no desire to live my life compartmentalized. For me, sex and friendship were quite fluid. The only terrifying taboo for me was incest, which I’d already flouted with Trent. There was also that time I almost went down on my sister, but I blame that on some really good pot Wilton had.

It wasn’t so much that I refused to recognize boundaries; it was more like I allowed boundaries to become clear on their own, case by case. Each encounter was its own negotiation, so to speak. And I had a lot of energy for that in those days. Later, as I got older, I may have felt the need to rely more on convention and expected roles: friends were friends, lovers were lovers, and never the twain should meet. But in those heady days, I was up for anything, and was keenly alert to changing moods and opportunities, minute by minute.

Nancy is a case in point. We were perfectly comfortable as platonic friends, but at the drop of a hat, our faces could be in each other’s crotches. There was never a moment either of us felt frustrated or put upon, where I would be horny for her but she wasn’t for me, or vice versa. We had a non-verbal way of communicating desire—when it was there, when it was absent. Funny thing was, when I took Nancy to visit Ann Arbor—she drove us out in her delivery van—I expected her to get along famously with Imelda. But they were too much alike, I suppose. Magenta-haired Nancy was like the punk interpretation of the older hippie chick Imelda, and although their politics, sexuality, and outlook on life were alike in so many ways, they just clashed over details. I think it was the wind chimes; I can’t imagine Nancy tolerating wind chimes—or candles or incense or any of that shit.

I was lucky to have so much friendship and love—often at the same time, but always coursing through my life like waves of energy—because I didn’t take any of it too seriously. Not after Ann Arbor with my delayed freshman crisis and Ms. Megaton Man breakout; I wasn’t in a rush. I suppose even young people who don’t happen to be megaheroes feel immortal during that time in their life; but know I was also Ms. Megaton Man certainly helped enormously with some of my self-esteem issues.

I was still a studious bookworm, but no longer the scrawny, shrimpy, bespectacled bookworm of my South Quad days. Nor was I the horny, over-eager slut of my early Ann Street days. I was just Clarissa James, single girl, confident senior, earning that double major and not lacking for orgasms.

But my reputation from my delayed freshman crisis followed me in unexpected ways. noticed this whenever I returned to Ann Arbor for a night out or ran into someone who knew me when. I was actually having more partners in Detroit—albeit at a more reasonable pace, but I was surprised at how many people I would run into who thought I was still partying like that first weekend of so after I had my Ms. Megaton Man breakout.

I became convinced early on that sex in America was all fucked up. Nancy and I loved crossing the bridge into Canada and visiting Windsor, by the way, which had a refreshing European feeling so different from stilted, midwestern, American Detroit. There, we couldn’t necessarily kiss and make out in restaurants and cafés, but at least we could hold hands while walking down the street without anyone batting an eye. If we had done that in Detroit, Nancy and I would not only have been Lesbians—which is more of a label than I care to digest—but a black chick and a white chick. If we’d even tried holding hands in the fine arts museum, everybody’s blood pressure would have gone up and the guards would have probably had us arrested. What bullshit.

I know it’s a cliché, but I’m not into labels. If we’ve made any progress as human beings since my college days, it’s that no one seems to have time for labels any more, and that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s not exactly the same thing as rejecting labels, which is what we were doing in those day—Avie would have praised it as an overtly political act—but one had no choice but to consciously reject labels in those days if you wanted to be yourself. Now it seems no one has time to sort through the labels to stick them on you, or even keep a list of labels at the ready anymore—it’s too much trouble. In those days, each relationship was its own negotiation; nowadays, no one has time or energy to negotiate or to judge. It’s not exactly the same thing as complete acceptance, but it feels like progress.

I think I would have been the same person, by the way, even if I had never discovered my megapowers, or never had any to begin with—or even if Dr. Quimby had zapped me with his ray and neutralized me. It might have taken me longer to come out my shell, but I think I would have eventually done it. Not that I’m particularly courageous, but there was always something inside me that rejected that parochial school sweater and skirt, that could never completely conform. Even while I tried to be the most conforming young person you’d ever meet.

One last observation, then I’ll shut up. Love—sex—in those days at least took my mind off of school, and school took my mind off of being a megahero. Even though I wasn’t much of a megahero at that point, the fact that I was Ms. Megaton Man never completely left the back of my mind. To the extent I was able to forget, I still had the souped-up costume in the back of my closet to remind me. That school, sex, megahero balance would soon shift, and being Ms. Megaton Man would overwhelm everything else, and I would yearn nostalgically for the good old days of late-night study and term papers and final exams. And sex—casual or serious.