Sad Geena. (actually Patricia Highsmith)
At eighteen I went off to Berkeley, to the dorms and by pure chance was assigned to a floor of such wild rebels, tasting their first freedom from home and any rules, each one of us encouraging our floor mates to ever wilder behavior, that it turned into a year of riotous living. In the middle of this year I had my last growth spurt of four inches and with it came a case of acne, which worsened over the next few years. No medicines worked. I was covered in pimples so large and red that I dreaded to look in the mirror each morning. This development didn’t stop me from partying with my mates but completely dashed any hopes of attention from the opposite sex. So I didn’t try, and when you don’t try, nothing happens.
I actually attribute my fast-growing interests and proficiency in literature during those years to this terrible case of acne. I partied much, especially the first year. But when I moved out on my own the second year I poured all my attention into books, while my companions were chasing after girls. I could have been at an all-boy’s college for that matter. I didn’t even look at or think of them. My acne cleared up the last year there. But by then it was far too late to change my reading interests. I was a hardened scholar. Coffee shops and pouring through stray volumes till midnight, with heavy course loads, was my love, with laser sharp focus. I remember during this period I would often lay my head on my pillow at night and realize that I hadn’t said a single word to anyone that whole day, though surrounded by them, not because I was antisocial, but because I was so caught up in the books I was reading.
When you’re antisocial you know it. You see people and avoid them and hate them. I was never such (unlike my friend Chuck). I walked through the crowded halls and always responded to a ‘hello’. But my looks were often so distant and remote, as if in deep meditation, few dared interrupt me. They’d step aside and let me pass. Even my teachers in class did the same. They probably thought me melancholy. But I aced my tests and at least a few days a week was talkative and friendly to all. They knew my acne affected me a great deal, and as if I were a leper, they left me alone when my glances indicated it. I talked to a few of the girls in my classes, briefly, and sometimes thought of them at night, before sleep, just as briefly, and also Geena from the past, her looks, her voice and eyes, like a ghost.
In my first two years at college I came back home each summer to Belmont. In the beginning of my third year my father was once again promoted and sent back to the Niagara Falls plant as manager, selling the house and moving on.
In those first two summers I would spend most weekend nights with my friends, getting stoned and devising ever stranger things to do. My mother had a small French car, a Renault, with a clutch. I had a license and could borrow it freely. The four of us, Brad, Rich, Jim and I, would take it on a Friday night to skyline boulevard. This road ran south along the hilltops, forested and empty, to a few smaller roads branching off and winding down the hills to the coast, with steep curves and gullies and the thick groves of pine and redwood trees making the roads dark, their path barely perceptible in the moonlight, and eerily quiet. The grade on these roads was such that I could put the Renault out of gear, turn the engine off and just roll silently through the black night, turning the headlights on only when needed, windows down so we could feel the cool night air. It was an amazing sensation of gliding through space in dead silence, the only noise the slight hiss of rubber kissing the pavement, the danger of plunging off the road at a sharp curve adding to the thrill.
At one party at Rich’s house, with seven or eight of us sitting around, (I remember Geena was there) all of us high on acid and booze, him more than anyone else, he stood up and walked straight through the thick plate glass sliding door to his backyard, thinking it was open. The glass shattered in one magnificent crash into a thousand pieces, falling like a cascade of water to the floor. I was sitting right next to it. We all jumped up, thinking he must be badly hurt. But as we walked him back in from the yard, dazed and as if waking up, we saw that he was totally uninjured, with just one tiny scratch on his forehead, the impact point, like one of those Karate experts who smash a stack of wood with their hand in one swift blow. He’d done it to the window with his forehead, though without knowing it. That was his luck in accidents, a charmed life, with some angel looking over him.
He visited me several times in Berkeley. The first time he came with Brad they happened in on one our wild dorm parties by which he was truly impressed, even by his standards. I visited him with my friend Kim on the eve of our friend Steve W.’s wedding, in July of 1978, another acid party at his house where he stood at the front door and the entrance fee was him squirting liquid acid into each of his guest’s mouths as they entered. In my case he squirted more than one drop, as I quickly realized. This was the last time I saw Geena.
I talked to her for hours that night about the university experience, my life charged through books, just me and her sitting on the counter in the kitchen in a corner, side by side, our hips touching. But she was already married, unhappily, her husband not there. I mentioned my long-ago secret feelings for her and we both sighed. The next day at Steve’s wedding, after two hours of sleep, we dosed a champagne fountain with the leftovers of the liquid acid, not enough to get anyone ‘ripped’. Maybe some of the parents felt slight effects. That night Rich drove me and Kim back to Berkeley, first to a bar where Kim fell backwards off a stool and a waitress miraculously caught his head in both her hands just inches above the cement floor, then back to my ‘Starry Plough’ apartment to drop us off, where Rich walked in with us and saw May in a total drug daze, her perfect body displayed in her underwear walking in circles in the middle of the living room with headphones on, swaying to music. But the headphones weren’t plugged into anything. He took one look at me, half in disbelief, half in admiration at the decadent life I was leading, shaking his head as he left to drive home.
The last time I saw him was four years later, back in San Mateo, his side of the bay. I visited Brad and we drove to see him. He’d come into his long-awaited inheritance, bought a small house and took us on a tour of it. There were few furnishings. When we came to the bedroom, (it was mid-afternoon) we saw a mattress on the floor with a woman lying under a single sheet in her underwear. It was Rich’s girlfriend. She was awake and smiled at us but didn’t get up. She was skinny and sickly looking, the ravages of drugs. Later Brad told me that Rich had spent most of his money on cocaine and was soon to run out. We talked about old times for several hours over beers. He told us this crazy story of how he tried Jimson weed once, a super powerful hallucinogen, and lost all touch with reality for two days, wandering the neighborhoods and waking up beside the nearby freeway. He told us it was exactly like Carlos Castaneda described. I’d read that book myself for a course in 1974, introduction to Philosophy, by Paul Feyerabend, a radical teacher if there ever was one.
We parted and I never heard of him again, or Brad for that matter. I wondered how they fared in life after that, not optimistically. But with his uncanny luck, he might have ended up rich in some penthouse in Vegas. I certainly hope so for all the rare times we had. He taught me that one could stretch the limits of drug use, occasionally, to outlandish degrees and come out fine. He was a Hunter S. Thompson without the fame, but a kindred soul in spirit.
