Learning to ride.
As Bones and May were rather remote to me and the world during these months I knew my stay there was coming to an end. But I did nothing, leaving it to fate and sure enough, fate in the form of Dennis, (once again) stepped in. He was the old college buddy who drove to Toronto in 1977, posted the hits of blotter acid on my dorm room door and got me kicked out of my next address by sleeping in the cubby hole behind the kitchen without the landlord’s permission, precipitating my leaving university forever. Then he drove off. Now he returned.
I was sitting in the living room reading one afternoon near the open glass door to the balcony, when I faintly heard someone calling my name from far away, over and over. I stepped out and there he was, at the far end of the street, walking my way with his friend Andy. Someone in Berkeley had told him the street I lived on but didn’t know the number and this was his way of finding me. I hadn’t seen him in two years. Once again he turned up at a pivotal hour to change the course of my life. Dennis the Menace. I thought of him as my nemesis and savior all in one. Whether he guided me or misled me in my journey, in several forks in the road, I’ll never know, because we have no idea what might have been waiting down that other path. But he always acted with the best intentions and so he was my friend.
We spent the afternoon drinking beers, catching up, recounting stories. He’d just returned to Berkeley from L.A. and rented an apartment with Andy and he told me if I ever needed a place to stay, the couch was mine.
A few days later Bones and May suddenly took off. I wouldn’t see them again for almost three years (except for a two day visit by Bones to San Diego the next year). It was the end of the month and the rent was due, which I couldn’t afford by myself. But I had a previous offer to stay at Norma’s for a while, another couch, so there I went.
Norma rented half a duplex house in a court, a dead end at the top of a hill. It had two bedrooms, one for her and Kim and the other for her daughter, while I had the living room couch. I played half the day with Amaris, when she was home, card games and such. At a neighbor’s garage sale I bought her a bicycle, her first, and taught her to ride it. One Saturday we took a hike in the empty hills near the house and pretended we were explorers, as no one had taken her on a hike before. We found two, flat, round and smooth rocks and I told her they were a great treasure. I carried them to her house and there we painted them with oil paints, in pretty colors, one for each of us. Then we put them in the fridge to cool them off. I told her that when they were cool they would make great pillows (it was a very hot day) and that when we laid our heads upon them and fell asleep they would tell us all the secrets of the Earth. Norma came home, opened the fridge and the stones were quickly relegated to Amaris’ bedroom, where for several nights I think she tried to sleep on hers. Soon they ended up in the backyard patio. But such was the fate of rocks, before ‘pet rocks’.
It was sometime during this month that I got the closest I ever did to a date with Norma. Kim was away for several days, I forget why. The back house on 7th street was still there and furnished and empty, just as we left it in March. Norma wanted me to meet a friend, a practiced, bearded journalist she knew in Berkeley, some ten years older than us, to possibly help me in my literary career. So we set out in the evening and at his place dropped acid together, drank beers and talked for hours in his living room, mostly about the Berkeley gazette he edited and published monthly, and leaving late, not wanting the long drive back to Marin, we spent the night in the cottage, she sleeping on the one bed, I on the floor beside her like a dog.
I can’t describe her to the degree she deserved as an attractive woman. She had one of the most feminine voices I ever heard, enhanced by her southern accent and all the trivial, feminine topics she chose. She had the loveliest legs and ass but said she could never date a man shorter than her. She was 5’ 11’’, so this cut me out at 5’ 10’’, along with ninety percent of mankind. I sighed as a lover but continued as a friend.
It was another case of the most opposite type attracting me, as somehow being the most feminine and the most sexually alluring. It was a youthful blind spot in this one arena of my life that created a deal of grief in the years ahead, as the most opposite woman was also the most dimwitted and erratic, always smiling in a charming, seductive way. But it was a silly smile, with lipstick and frills and chatter. Any intelligent women I met, with the focused mind and the sharp, steely-eyed gaze and serious demeanour that goes with it, seemed unfeminine to me, almost a man in fact, someone to debate but never romance. Yet what a better choice such a partner would have made, in every single way!
