Northern California
I see in this record a little bit of development in my own character. I clearly recognized that all relationships come at a price and that in some cases the sacrifice was too costly to pay. The break-up with Lindsey taught me that. If this date happened a year earlier, I would have pursued her with all the mad puppy-love of a boy. Now, (not in any way to disparage her considerable feminine charms, which I noticed even in the throws of love with Dale) I could simply shrug off the whole matter with hardly an afterthought. The only other mention of her in my journal comes a few weeks later when I think of composing a letter to her suggesting we might become good friends. Neither the letter nor the hope materialized. It might not even have been a ‘hope’ in my mind, just an excuse for an epistolary exercise, to test what persuasive powers I had.
She did once mention Dale that second night — she knew the whole history of our love affair, as Dale’s confidant, even saw some of it and she showed me a postcard recently received from Dale, that said she’d soon be back in town. This news took a day to register in my mind. The next day I wrote in my notebook: “It will be much trouble and anguish for me if she does return. But laying on this bed, depressed, homeless (‘C’ had left town for a two week trip back East and left me his house), thinking myself in most respects friendless and loveless and still with a half-contented feeling…I go on at great length complaining of C’s house, my miserable surroundings, my work, my love life, then changing my tune to ‘it’s not all that bad’, I ponder the idea of going to Europe and if I did, who I should take as a companion:
“Dale would be fun but terrible to go with, a spendthrift demanding all my time, and I getting nothing done (in writing projects). With Lindsey I’d feel more comfortable and cozier but annoyances and squabbles might crop up too”. Both ideas are completely ridiculous and I see it in the next few lines, calling myself a ‘prodigal fool’. In my drug-addled brain at this time I knew I was at a crossroads in my life. But I was also gleaning the fact that I had to find some new woman or decide to have none at all and live celibate. Fate decided that choice for me a few months later.
I was devising general stereotypes of women, trying to put then into categories I could understand and see and predict. But all people are too complicated for that and my axioms were ridiculous, laughable but still amusing:
“Most young women fall in love with a man on this one criterion: the length and thickness of his eyelashes. Men, on the other hand fall in love with certain parts of a woman’s body, never the whole person, just certain physical features she owns. Most of these attributes she doesn’t even realize or regard. But if she does, she uses them to captivate the man, that is, if she wants him. Of the eyelash fetish, it always ends in disappointment, a chimera, a mirage of a well in a dessert to a thirsty being. It’s an item revealing no character traits, something to dote upon on a face, but the moment the mouth opens and talks a whole different reality appears, far different from the dream, it expresses the character which is the cement of compatible beings”.
When ‘C’ told me he was going back East for two weeks to visit his New York city relatives he said I could use his house but he also mentioned he was thinking of taking a much longer break when he got back, for several months at least. He was all ‘moneyed-up’ to his satisfaction. At the same time Louie told me of someone I should meet, ‘K’, a lesbian, looking for a business partner. She was about my age, tall, skinny with glasses, a radical, feminist but not so much so as to exclude making a lot of money in a short time with a partner of the despised sex. She had numerous connections within the large, gay community of S.F. Many of these were affluent professionals and their appetite for stimulants was huge.
She had a small ranch in the middle of nowhere, in the hills of the coastal range above Healdsburg, a three hour drive from S.F. She had a generator for power and a spring. Her nearest neighbor was eight miles away and her house only accessible by a thirty minute drive up a very winding dirt road through barren, grass covered hills, almost embarrassing looking in their nakedness. She had the location and customers and I was to provide all the rest, which I had in regal abundance, materials and knowledge. Louie set up an interview for the three of us in a dyke restaurant over breakfast and a deal was struck right there.
To this day I have no idea how Louie ever met and knew all these people. He had nothing to do with any such activities and hardly ever even partied. He knew the warehouse people but never lived there. He knew interesting people in S.F., beautiful Swedish waitresses, and then Brian in S.F. He also introduced me to his friends, where I spent a number of fascinating nights. But he hardly seemed to socialize, so where did all these connections come from? In the whole time I knew him, from 84 to 89, we were together maybe ten times, and half of those were life changing events for me.
He threw one party in all that time, a Super Bowl party that Sanita and I and fifteen others enjoyed one great afternoon. It wasn’t even a party with drugs, more chips and dips and a few beers. Yet he managed to set me up with ’K’, out of the blue, unasked for and unexpected, then ‘A’, with perfect timing, my next partner in a far different place, again unasked for and a total surprise, a perfect match for me at the time, and which allowed me to finish up all business in two months. With anyone else it would have taken three times that long. Then finally he took me to where I met my wife Sanita, the most important partner in all in my life, in an insanely ‘nowhere land’ near the border of Guatemala, with a last minute airplane ticket he begged me to accept.
