Compromise: life is all about compromise. While this might be a strange place to note some of the following, the story is integral to how things evolved around my first marriage. This is Sheila Darlene Clark, and I’m using the date on the photo for the day we met because it was taken early on and when precisely we first bumped into each other is no longer knowable. While I’d been in Germany a brief two months when we met, and there was no shortage of opportunities to pay for sex over in Frankfurt’s red-light district, in the back of my primal brain, there was still a remnant of thought that I was supposed to form relationships that lasted longer than 10 to 15 minutes.
Not that I was looking for anyone at this time, but one night while hanging out with Rosario, the same guy who introduced me to those houses of ill-repute I was spending inordinate amounts of time at, we went out to Wiesbaden Air Base where his girlfriend was stationed. Her roommate was the woman above, Sheila. While I could pay for all the sex I wanted and needed, what I couldn’t find were people who were interested in traveling.
During my first month in Germany, after taking care of “other needs,” as the red-light district was open 24 hours a day, I would get on any train in the downtown area and ride it to its terminus or get off at a random point. After exhausting the local U-Bahn routes, I turned to the S-Bahns that went further out, and then I bought a car. This was my 1976 Mercedes 350 SE. While I had a car, very few fellow soldiers were interested in venturing out into “the Economy,” as it was colloquially called, and I found myself as alone as ever.
While Rosario “visited” his girlfriend, Sheila and I took a walk to afford them some privacy. During that walk, she voiced a lament that she’d been in Germany for months and hadn’t gone anywhere while I’d already roamed far and wide in the Rhein-Main area. I said, “We should go somewhere,” and she enthusiastically agreed. I told her that I wanted to go to Paris but was nervous about driving so far as I wasn’t exactly comfortable driving over here yet, and I’d heard bus tours were going there that were cheap. Awesome, she wanted to go.
That single bus tour was the only one I needed to go on to become fully aware that I’d never do that again, ever. But we were in Paris, France, while everyone else we knew was on their base, probably watching TV, eating Doritos, and cleaning their asses with 3-ply American toilet paper. while we got to laugh about the newspaper-grade single-ply sandpaper Europeans had somehow become comfortable with.
With barely an hour allocated for our stop in the Louvre, it was essentially a sprint to see a few things of importance to allow adequate bragging rights to family back home, and then we ran back to the meeting point to visit the next location.
Early in the morning and late in the afternoon, our time was our own, and we were able to wander around. Not speaking French and not being surrounded by Americans (Germany had a million soldiers and dependents on its lands during the Cold War), we were nervous, to say the least, about getting lost or encountering the rudeness that was an ugly stereotype shared by Americans regarding the French. Neither of us found the French hostile to us, even though we were obviously soldiers to anyone who met us.
Damn, do I have a severe case of knocked knees or what? This photo of me was snapped at Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank of Paris; I was 23 years old and astonished that I was in this magnificent city.
Part of our weekend guided tour of the Paris area included a couple of hours at Versailles. I should point out that at this time, Sheila and I were not romantically entangled but simply friends who enjoyed having someone else wanting to go places. It was not uncommon for U.S. soldiers to hold in contempt where they were stationed in Europe and spend their days longing to return to the “Real World.”
Realizing that traveling long distances wasn’t that difficult, Sheila joined me for a quick weekend trip down to southern Germany with a dipping of our toes into Innsbruck, Austria. We didn’t stay in one place long, just one night in Innsbruck and the next in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Sheila was just as enchanted by the natural beauty of the Alps or the history of Neuschwanstein Castle as I was.
Passing exits on travels triggered thoughts of other travels, and while we didn’t have time to dip into Munich on our first trip south, on this one, we’d explore this area and visit Augsburg, which we’d learned was the city that had the first social housing on Earth.
Sure, we wanted to see Munich and Augsburg, but what caught my eye was how close we were to the old concentration camp known as Dachau. I naively thought that visiting a death camp would be a walk in the park, but I was wrong; it was grim, harsh, and emotionally loaded.
After going south, it was time to go north. We visited Köln, known as Cologne to English speakers, during Fasching, also known as Mardi Gras. On another trip north, we drove up to Hannover to the zoo that was highly recommended. This visit only helped drive home how much I hate animal prisons.
So there we were; we’d been to Luxembourg, France, Austria, and many points around Germany, and we were still not a couple. But then, on or around December 7th, 1985, in a moment of passion, Sheila, who up to that point never had a steady boyfriend, for some dumb reason or other, lost her virginity to a guy who really only cared about fucking anything that moved. After that one awkward encounter, we returned to a platonic relationship of mutual interest in traveling. By the way, how, after all these years, could I peg that on December 7, 1985? Read on.
Then, right before Christmas and our last trip of the year, we visited Amsterdam. This was not the same city it would become years later when it was no longer a place for its residents as much as it became the stomping grounds for tourists. But on our visit, it was kind of grungy, not too crowded, and away from the red-light district, it was seriously quiet, serene even.
In the new year, I got the news directly from Sheila that she was pregnant and knew it could only be mine because never before and not since had she had sex with someone else, ever. Well, that changed the dynamic. Once it was decided that she didn’t want an abortion, we agreed that, at least for a period of some time, we’d attempt to act like parents. Truth was, she would always have to act like a parent from this point forward while I attempted to reconcile that I wasn’t feeling love for this woman, but on the other hand, I did father a child.
I know, before we can’t travel due to pregnancy and then the subsequent birth of a child, we should travel NOW. We caught what was called a HOP that allowed us to jump on a plane that had available space. Our first stop was in Athens, Greece.
Next up, we flew down to Madrid, Spain. In many ways, there was some compatibility in that Sheila enjoyed travel and never once turned up her nose to jumping into a new experience or trying new flavors. Sure, she needed someone to spur her into action, but at least she could get going. From August of ’85 through April of ’86, I’d met plenty of other women, aside from the constant influx of paid encounters, and never could I find the spark that went beyond the desire to satisfy myself sexually. The intellectual and cultural curiosity just never enchanted me so much that any of the women I met were truly and deeply intriguing. Everything was about compromise.
With the baby’s arrival just around the corner, we put the brakes on travel and got married so our new arrival would have parents with the same names on her birth certificate, and I grew resigned to the idea that love is rare and may only happen once in life. Like so many before and since these decisions, I figured that a baby might bring us closer together and that the instinct to be a father would crush my other proclivities. I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet. Sheila Darlene Clark was now known as Specialist Wise to her fellow soldiers, Sheila Wise to her family back home in Kansas, and wife to me.
