Lindy
Now I come to a remarkable night in my life, one that changed it. I still remember it clearly. I recorded most of it at the time but added details later, as it played in my thoughts and loomed in my imagination over the years as the most ridiculous and improbable chain of coincidences. It was early November, a Wednesday. These are my records:
“I just came home from work and got paid and had the next few days off, so I called Zan to purchase some speed. Zan and her husband Bob were a middle-aged couple, longtime residents of Berkeley and they knew a very competent chemist. Whenever he would cook up a batch they’d lay in a good supply and sell to their select friends. Thanks to Bone’s introduction a few months earlier I was now a member of that coterie.
On this occasion I was in luck. Zan drove to my house, I tried a line and found it so excellent I bought a gram. Zan departs and I sit and write at my table the very pages before me now and do a few more lines. After an hour or so, in the finest of ‘glows’, feeling thirsty, I walk to the Plough. It’s five p.m. and only six or seven people at the bar.
I am standing next to this stranger, (Mike) sipping my beer and hearing him talk in a boasting manner to a pretty woman sitting on his other side also sipping a beer. It’s obvious they are strangers and he’s accosted her but she listens patiently. Seeing me close by he begins to address us both, wanting a wider audience I suppose. He tells us he’s just arrived from Phoenix, Arizona, a musician, and that what he has seen of the drugs here so far, the ones in Phoenix are far superior, especially the speed. That he should mention this very drug, of which I had one of the finest exemplars in my pocket as he spoke, I thought it such an odd remark that it beggared credulity. But I proceeded gingerly. I humbly interjected that maybe he just had a poor source, and that time and other trials might modify his view. This set him off on an even louder spiel, (and beginning to be embarrassing to us as the bartender was standing nearby) about the labs in Arizona, of which he knew a great deal, the cleaner air, the desert sterility, all contributing to making their speed the best in the nation. The ludicrous nature of these points and the fervent warmth of his assertions affected my usual reserve to the breaking point. I tap him on the shoulder to quiet him and calmly whisper that if he and his lady friend should wish to accompany me to my lodgings just a block away, I would give them demonstrable and palpable proof that his assertions were wrong. They both immediately downed their beers and followed me up the street.
So at my place, seated at my table, we started doing lines. Mike quickly agreed that my stuff was excellent. Now we introduced ourselves more intimately, telling our stories and becoming friends. Mike was my age and size. He even looked a little like me, a fast talker, sharp and eager to make friends. He’d just moved here from Phoenix, liked it here and was trying to convince his girlfriend, Laurel, to come here too. She was still in Arizona, an art student, very pretty and talented, as he described her at length. Our other guest, present and real, was Lindy. She was a few years older than us, very pretty, slim, our height with straight, long, light brown hair and thin rimmed glasses. She worked as a care giver at a senior’s home and was studying to become a nurse. She was recently divorced. She had a three-year-old boy shared equally between her and her ex, who lived nearby. She was from Missoula, Montana, went to university there and told us what a wild party town it was. She was educated and had some literature, some French and an interest in the French nineteenth century poets, so we hit it off very well, our first impressions of each other, and I immediately developed a fascination for her.
We talked away several hours, doing more lines, went back to the Plough thirsty, drank, came back to my place for more lines, talking ever more fervently and personally, then back to the Plough till it closed. Just as it announced ‘last call’ we somehow picked up another stranger, Mike Fahey, a very skinny, red haired kid straight off the boat from Ireland, with a strong Irish accent. He lived next to the Plough, had some relation to its owner and a case of beer in his room, so we dragged both to my place and finished off my speed. This lasted us till dawn. At six a.m. the bars in California open. We drove to a sleazy one way up College avenue in Lindy’s car, near where she lived. I remember being surprised as we walked in, as it was only ten minutes past six, yet there were already two customers sitting there. We ordered Bloody Mary’s, but Fahey was so loud and incoherent (he’d never done speed before) in his crazy ramblings to a T.V. news broadcast playing on the wall in front of us, he got us kicked out before we could hardly finish our drinks. He kept repeating that he was ‘loose as a goose’. He was in fragile health, allergic to alcohol and had never partied so much. We drove him home, exchanged phone numbers and hugged ‘goodbye’s’, promising to get together soon again, except for Mike Fahey who was going back to Ireland soon. He might not survive another ramble with us”.
That dawn, after we dropped Fahey off, and then Mike, Lindy drove me to my backyard driveway in the morning light, and told me what a wonderful time she’d had. She said this with such a lovely honesty in her sweet, feminine voice that I leaned over and kissed her, my arm slipping around her neck. She leaned towards me, face forward, and her lips were compliant. With that I was stricken, shot by Cupid’s arrow. I was in love, deeply so, for the very first time.
That’s the way it is in love. We love those who love us, because we see they see something in us which others don’t see, and we love them for that mutual perception, the dream that they might really admire and value us, as we admire them.
