This reminds of a sight my parents and I were somewhat shocked to see when we first arrived in the Bay area. It was a warm Sunday in late 1967 and my parents thought it would be nice to pay a visit to Golden Gate Park, which they’d heard so much about. So with me in between them we strolled down a path. There weren’t many people there, but there was one, walking slowly towards us from opposite direction, and no one else on this trail. I shouldn’t say walking, as she seemed to just float along. She was a young, tall girl, a teenager still, all dressed in a pure, white robe down to her feet, a flower child no doubt. But she was in a daze, a drug daze of some kind. Her face was a scary, white skin, her skinniness unhealthy looking and she didn’t see us as she passed right by, her eyes were looking straight ahead at nothing.
It had a shivering effect on all of us, an apparition like a ghost. My parents said nothing but must have wondered what a strange new world they’d brought me to.
The first time we scored L.S.D. from Rich he had somewhere to go. So Brad, Jim and I repaired to one of our higher tree forts to test it out. It was a summer evening. I was just seventeen and they both sixteen. We sat on the plywood floor awhile talking and waiting impatiently and after half an hour it struck. The walls began melting and the tree seemed to sway much more than it really did, and we were too scared to climb down. But finally we did, one by one, into the dark woods, taking an hour for what should have taken just minutes and then creeping home, seeing imaginary lights and frightened by the slightest sounds. After that we learned to confine our acid trips to the comforts of Rich’s den, with its black light and posters, a couch, table and ashtrays, and cold beers.
But this partying, for us at least (Brad, Jim and I) was still very occasional, less than once a month. It was a long walk to his house and we had so many other compelling interests we stayed in our neighborhood. Before setting off to college I think I dropped acid five or six times and hung out at Rich’s maybe fifteen times, mostly in the summer before I left for college. I divided my time between all my various friends and kept a good share for myself alone, and my many hobbies.
Soon after I met Rich he got his first license and his parents bought him a purple Mustang convertible. It was a car to fall in love with. In the next two years he crashed that car three times. Each time his parents had the car repaired and the keys handed back to him. He was a good driver but suffered from the handicap that he was almost always an impaired driver.
One night, alone on a dark, winding hillside road and tripping heavily on LSD he had a head on collision with a cop car. Both cars were slightly outside their lanes because of the very sharp curve and the police accepted the blame. Rich had a very great knack of not showing how high he was, (from constant practice) and in a way he was charmed.
Soon after, again on a Saturday night, he drove the mustang through the front window of a business on the El Camino Real, the main drag from San Jose to San Francisco. It had two lanes each direction, lined with stores and businesses. He had a trick of driving at about fifty miles an hour and jerking the steering wheel just right and the car would hop neatly from one lane to the next. One night with Stuey he tried to show it off but overshot, landing the car in the showroom of ‘Motor Music’. Neither were hurt and when the cops came he told them he’d been cut off by a speeding driver and driven off the road. They believed him.
The third time I had the pleasure to be seated in the passenger seat and experience a crash firsthand. We were driving down this same road, the ‘El Camino’ on a rainy afternoon. Traffic was very light. We were smoking some very good hash from his small, metal hash pipe, passing it back and forth, talking away when all of a sudden he fell silent and the car drifted slowly from one lane halfway over so that the markers for the two lanes in our direction were running directly under the center of the car. The road was straight, there were no other cars near us, and he continued on this course for over a minute, keeping the car at the same speed and exactly between the two lanes.
At first I thought this a nice effect, the lane markers illuminated by our headlights and rolling directly under the center of the car. But then I noticed another car way up ahead stopped in the fast lane, waiting to make a left-hand turn and for the opposite traffic to clear, with its signal on. On this trajectory our drivers’ side would smack the passenger side of the other car. Now I mussed, both of us still silent, and I in a kind of dreamy state from the hash, that he must be playing chicken with me, to see when I would panic. So I stayed mum. We got closer and closer until ‘boom’, we smacked the car, spun around and the other car did the same, luckily not into the opposing traffic. We got out in slight shock. There was a girl our age out from the other car bawling her eyes out. No one was hurt, just the vehicles. The cops took some time to get there and for us to hide our stash and collect our wits. Rich calmly explained to them that she didn’t have her turn signal on, visibility was poor and at the last minute he saw that she was stopped, tried to swerve out of the fast lane but not in time. The girl was still crying and incoherent and the back end of her car so smashed that both lights were broken, so even when she said she had her signal on there was no way to tell if it had been on or was even functional. Once again the cops sided with Rich in the accident report.
On the way home (the car was still drivable), I asked him why he hit her. He told me that right after he took his last hit of hash his eyesight went blank but his mind was functioning so he just kept on driving, holding the steering wheel steady, thinking his sight would return any second. And it did with the crash, along with his talent for excuses.
One other person I met through Rich was a girl our age named Geena. She lived down the street from him and would join us sometimes for our weekend parties. She was always welcome. She wore jeans, talked like us, swore like us, enjoyed the same pastimes and jokes and we hardly considered her a girl, just another friend, another tomboy in my life, though this one played a much deeper role in my puberty expanded imagination. I dreamed of her as my girlfriend. She was of Italian descent, with dark eyes and hair, a pretty face, slim, with boyish mannerisms, smart and able to join in any conversation with us on a par.
I probably only saw her ten times before I left for college. One day Brad convinced her to walk all the way with him to our street, to meet his one-year younger sister, Nicky, to see if they’d become friends (which didn’t happen). But I was there and before she left I showed her my house and my room, its two tables full of my projects, briefly, the only girl ever to cross that threshold. She politely said ‘hello’ to my parents, who must have been in wonder at the unique sight of a girl with me, then she left.
While I’m on this subject let me succinctly relate the whole history of my dealings and transactions with the opposite sex, (besides talk and dreams) before the age of twenty-three.
If this work were divided into chapters based on subjects, and this one was called ‘Robert’s early love life’, it would bear a striking similarity with that famous chapter ‘On Snakes’, written by an obscure writer who traveled to Iceland in the eighteenth century and who published a book on his observations there. He headed one of his many chapters ‘On Snakes’ and wrote: “There are no snakes to be found in Iceland”. It’s the shortest chapter ever written. My sex life would make for a similar chapter, my hugging, kissing and dating life exactly the same, non-existent, except for Jane.
The reason for this was twofold. Up until the age of eighteen I was short, about five foot six and baby-faced. Puberty didn’t hit until seventeen and I had so many other interests that I spent no time on trying to date girls, even though my friends Brad and Dave were well on their way into this experiment. I remember listening to Brad describing his weekly reports on his first girlfriend, Beverly, and thinking to myself I was lucky not to have one. She was cute and they did have sex. But she was jealous of every girl he glanced at and constantly suspected he was flirting. He told me all the details of every date with her so I had a sort of surrogate sex life. Rich had no girlfriend. He needed none. He was popular with everyone. His passion was getting wasted, so even Geena never entered his head as a romantic concern, just a partner in decadence. I adopted him as my model over Brad.
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