Before I became Frau Kolb, I was a single girl growing up in Manhattan, New York. Despite the fact that I always wore combat boots and thought myself some sort of punk; boys and men liked me and I went out on lots and lots of fun dates.\u00a0 (There are so many opportunities for a beer drinking girl, that likes to listen to men talk, to be taken out in a city full of bars, and no need to ever drive a car.)\u00a0 I like(d) boys and men, too.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always seen them as those two distinct categories. Boys are cute, sexually attractive beings, with little else to offer.<\/p>\n
Men are sometimes handsome, sometimes NOT, yet always come with financial muscle.<\/p>\n
Boys you play with and get over, because they are out there playing and getting on with being boys.<\/p>\n
Men are dangerous.\u00a0 One must be cautious.\u00a0 Listen.\u00a0 Say, \u201cNo!\u201d often.\u00a0 You don\u2019t want a man to get the impression he can do whatever he wants with you.\u00a0 Never.\u00a0 Men will take you for a ride if they believe they can.\u00a0 You must pay attention.\u00a0 You must be ready to run or fight.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be scared, yet don\u2019t be vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that said\u2026<\/p>\n
One love affair blended into the next and I dated some truly amazing men.\u00a0 Having left home at age seventeen, by the time I was twenty-one, I\u2019d lived with a man that got me my first job cooking at an exclusive health club in Manhattan.\u00a0 I\u2019d go into work at five am and \u201ccut down a crate of carrots, onions, celery, wash the turkey, season it, turn on the convection oven\u2026\u201d I\u2019d be there, focused, cooking\u2026 day after day\u2026 I made a turkey every week day for almost two years, straight.\u00a0 Until I was promoted within the company to a better, more luxurious location at the Atrium building on 57th Street.<\/p>\n
So\u2026 from my beautiful, former model, tall and slender, blue-eyed Mayflower WASP professional bartender boyfriend, I learned: cooking as a way of making a living and to this day, I can make lunch for a hundred with ease.\u00a0 Serving food is my forte.\u00a0 I cook daily, at home and it means the world to me to do so.\u00a0 Every time my husband and I have people over for a seamless dinner I thank good for my EX, boyfriend, who taught me how to keep it sizzling.\u00a0 Every time.<\/p>\n
Yet, I left him for a man, with big green eyes, dark hair, creamy colored thick smooth skin, fat lips\u2026 ah!\u00a0 I found him so sexually appealing, he looked like a man, he was twice my age, but really he was just an old boy\u2026 he had no clue how to make a living and I guess he was just waiting for his mother to pass away so he might inherit the house\u2026 whatever\u2026 I had to pay half the rent; this boyfriend was a chronic smoker of what is now called, \u201cMedical.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This boy-man and I sent a lot of time drinking and exploring horizontal positions.\u00a0 We were happy children together, yet I had to pay half the rent, even though he was twice my age and I was\u2026 well frankly a long leggy stunner\u2026<\/p>\n
Leaving room for the next boyfriend to slip in with his wallet.\u00a0 I left the cozy, comfortable, German and Irish, beer drinking, and self-help book reading, Boy Toy Man that could barely pay his half of our East Village rent for the rust-funded Little MAN that dominated my life, ate my peace, destroyed my ability to earn a living working in restaurants, by taking me out to eat almost daily, to expensive joints in Soho, while showering me with presents and cash.\u00a0 I was, seriously, his sugar baby.\u00a0 I had no idea that was what I was.\u00a0 I thought he loved me and that we would someday marry.<\/p>\n
At first, I felt so bad that he had a girlfriend living with him when we met.\u00a0 Yet, he assured me\u2026 he pursued me, he seduced me with his elegant script on fine paper love letters\u2026 Ah!\u00a0 At the end-of-the-day\u2026 I\u2019m a Romantic.\u00a0 My grandfather was Spanish\u2026 I have a soft spot for Picasso and bleeding bulls.<\/p>\n
This important EX taught me about ART, Fibonacci wave patterns, and the stock market. (Lest we forget: he was mind boggling between the sheets, a true artist.) I loved him\u2026 but I was immature and\u2026 I kept finding myself with other guys, including that Irish\/German Hippy apologetically Stoner Dude, mentioned before\u2026 and the English boyfriend, the one with the golden red hair\u2026 oh, no\u2026 now my time line is messed up\u2026 anyway\u2026 there was some overlap.\u00a0 The Little Art Man from California, challenged me, \u201cI can\u2019t marry someone who hasn\u2019t gone to college.\u201d He said smugly, one day.\u00a0 Thus, I decided to apply to many a school, I got into all my choices, and was offered a full scholarship at Columbia University in the city of New York.<\/p>\n
Thank goodness.<\/p>\n
The boyfriend story, however, continues:<\/p>\n
Then came H.\u00a0 We met at the bar at the brand-new Reebok Club in NYC.\u00a0 I was a student at Columbia University, looking for a quiet, refined place, to read my material for a literature class.\u00a0 He was making Monica Lewinsky jokes, the news was on an old television set over the bar.\u00a0 He was funny. He was cute, big brown eyes. He said he was 52 years old and yet, he looked great to me.\u00a0 I was no ageist.<\/p>\n
Soon it became redundantly clear that he was really rich.\u00a0 He introduced me to the pleasure of drinking fine red wine.\u00a0 In his company I learned to eat as many oysters as I pleased, and to distinguish between luxury and everything else.\u00a0 I loved him.\u00a0 I would have gladly married him and had his Jewish babies.\u00a0 I would have converted with pride and become more Jewish than any other convert.\u00a0 Yet, it turned out that he had lied about his age, he was actually 72.\u00a0 I was 24.\u00a0 He was fitter than I, and I was fit.\u00a0 He was still running marathons.\u00a0 He did advanced yoga.\u00a0 He was a physical marvel.\u00a0 I wanted babies.\u00a0 He was over it.\u00a0 His sons were older than me. I only met one of them, at his Hampton estate, and I felt ill at ease: he could have been my father! So…<\/p>\n
Toward the end of our six or seven month relationship, we met up in England\u2026 no I was in England, in London for the summer, staying with a friend and his girlfriend, chasing the red-haired Oxford illusion\u2026 that boyfriend, which actually, was a brief yet\u2026 not easily dismissed\u2026 I was 17 and he was 18, when we met\u2026 he was in NYC for the summer, it was his first job, mine too, at a restaurant on the Upper East Side.\u00a0 He was staying with his classmate, whose father was the second at the British consulate.\u00a0 (They used to call me, \u201cThe Pretty Negress.\u201d) So\u2026 he had a whole floor in a brownstone in the best location\u2026 near the crappy restaurant, where the EX boyfriend that got me my first cooking job when RED left me to go back to his life of privilege and life quenching adherence to antiquated notions of propriety.\u00a0 Ah\u2026 the British\u2026 love \u2018em, hate \u2018em\u2026 they continue.<\/p>\n
Anyway\u2026 RED, gave me insights into the mentality of a vaguely aristocratic or rather POSH mentality, which to this day irks me.\u00a0 He was the most unapologetically classist being I\u2019d ever met.\u00a0 (I guess IF a system works for you, then you work to uphold it\u2026), which I found refreshingly honest.\u00a0 I liked him, a lot\u2026 I liked his voice: proper English.\u00a0 Listening to him, chatting with him\u2026 is blissful, at times\u2026 we stayed in touch for years, I\u2019d call him and he\u2019d share his adventures, until recently\u2026 when it became clear that he was taking ME, Frau Kolb, totally for granted, he\u2019d become used to having me share of myself with him.\u00a0 Further more, he secretly prefers to date young black girls from the wrong side of London\u2026 a secret, which offends me.\u00a0 Thus, I let go of that attachment, only recently.<\/p>\n
Back to H.<\/p>\n
We were not together for very long.\u00a0 He got along famously: both New Yorkers.\u00a0 He was from the Bronx and had grown up struggling.\u00a0 I loved his Alpha-Male energy.\u00a0 Yet, he was very old and very wealthy.\u00a0 I was completely at ease in his company.\u00a0 I felt safe allowing him to make decisions\u2026 the only topic I knew more about than him was art\u2026 He started collecting Miro\u2026 I would have gladly married him.\u00a0 He was the only person I ever met that had the capacity to keep me completely entertained and at ease; no need to work, invisible servants catered to our every whim when we lived together at the Hampshire House.\u00a0 I had my own room, filled with books, and a wonderful view.\u00a0 Every night we went out to New York\u2019s best seafood restaurants.\u00a0 I ate oysters.\u00a0 He ate grilled fish and salad.\u00a0 We drank VINO, together.\u00a0 He was the BEST, until he dumped me.<\/p>\n
Yes.\u00a0 It is true.<\/p>\n
The lessons he taught me: he taught me that CASH, a big wad of it, waved at anybody in service with get you whatever you want.\u00a0 Drop a hundred dollar bill on a host in a restaurant and you will get the best table.\u00a0 Moreover, make a habit of giving to others more than they expect and then leave them when they get addicted to your magnificence and they will remember you for life.<\/p>\n
* Special thanks to my husband Hartmuth, for helping me, sort out my history and for not being afraid of ghosts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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