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and what would happen tonight at the Ritz Club or the Club Alabam. We spent a long time together. I finally said I had to go home. I took her to her house and no one was there but I didn't even try to kiss her; when I went to leave she took hold of my arm and looked at me and said, "Don't you like me?" I said, "Of course I like you." She said, "Well, you don't act like it." I grabbed her arm and gave it a squeeze and then I turned around and walked away. I almost started crying. It was unbearable. It was like a pain and I had to get away from her. I walked home and from that minute ... It would have been better to have gone on the way I was; I'd grown comfortable. That meeting was too much. Now I knew no matter what happened, no matter what, I knew I had to have her. I couldn't do anything but think about her and want her, to have her and protect her and look at her and smell her, just to brush my hand against her arm.
We started meeting and talking. We'd ditch school a lot. We'd walk around. I didn't try to do anything sexually with her for a long time, but we kept seeing each other, and then I kissed her, and then we started messing around. Sometimes, if my grandmother wasn't home, we'd go over there. I'd borrow my cousin's car, and we'd go park, and we'd pet.
I met her mother. Her mother had been married to a musician who'd treated her. bad. I could see that that was going to be a problem. I had to sneak around to see her because her mother was afraid of me, but I had fallen in love and I think Patti had, too. One day her mother woke up with a pain in her stomach, and she died that evening. She had gangrene of the intestines, I think. She had had several abortions, and probably those caused that. Patti was sent to Arizona to some relatives before she could contact me. She wrote and told me what had happened. I was miserable. Finally, she came to visit an aunt in Glendale.
They were going to send her away again, and I couldn't stand that. We wanted to get married. Patti was sixteen and I was seventeen. My dad thought we should hold off and see how we felt in a year or so, but to us that seemed like a lifetime. I borrowed my cousin's car and we went to Tijuana to one of those places, and some guy married us. He called in his secretary and a guy from the street and they witnessed the ceremony: "Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?" In broken English, and we were married. I wanted it all to be legal. I didn't want that love ruined by our living together without being married because at that time I was extremely moralistic.
We came back with our little certificate and there was nothing the families could do but okay it. My father was furious because he wanted to have us married in the house with my grandmother there. I was his only son and he wanted to do it right. We had another ceremony to satisfy him, and then we rented an apartment down by Adams above Fiqueroa.
Before we went to Tijuana we'd work each other into such a state it was unbelievable. She kept asking me, telling me she wanted me to do it, and once I tried, but it was a horrible, horrible scene, and then she started bleeding. So after we got married, it was agony trying to have intercourse without hurting her, but finally I got through, and it was perfect from then on. As I look back I see that all we had was sex, that beauty, and we made love continuously. I remember once we made love eleven times in one day and I came all those times.
For a while, before we got the apartment, we stayed with my grandmother. We'd wait until she left the house and the minute she was gone we'd take our clothes off and start making love. We'd do it in the front room so we could look out the window and watch for her. When she was home we weren't able to contain ourselves, so we'd go out to the old garage in the back, which was filled with stuff; there was a place at the top where there were two mattresses on the beams we could climb up onto. Patti would wear a cotton