My friends and I were renting an old farmhouse in Solsbury, Indiana for $45 a month, ice cream cones were five cents in the little store down the road. I was almost eighteen and felt pretty lost in those days finding momentary solace smoking a joint sitting on the defunct tractor out in the field behind the house but the confusion would come back doubled once I came down. Gaybe was fifteen and wanted someone to hitchhike with to California and though I hadn't thought about heading West I had been a subscriber to the Berkeley Tribe for a year or so. We left that night and by the time we got to Missouri our latest driver was picking up everyone, the car was so full one boy was lying across the seats above us. In the middle of the night outside Lawrence, Kansas a friendly guy took us home, turned us on to a white ceramic pipe full of weed, and then dropped us back by Interstate 70. The next day we got to Grand Junction, Colorado where we split a hit of windowpane acid and drove through an incredible lightening storm in Utah. Gaybe was very deep and I was pretty shallow and this was a difference that annoyed her to no end.
We split up when we got to Berkeley and I discovered that a tick had ridden on my left nipple for the whole 48 hours from the Indiana farmhouse. I was one of those backpack-toting kids on Sproul Plaza with my green frisbee and when a woman asked if she could throw it with me I said, “If you're human you can.” For some reason that intrigued her and the next day she picked me up and took me to her friend's house who was a doctoral candidate at Cal. Jean was a twenty-seven year old junior high teacher in Hayward married to a German guy. We smoked a joint, I got on top of her and we started to have sex, but I was very inexperienced.
“Well, bounce up and down or something,” she said. That night some cute Moonie girls invited me to dinner at a very nice house up in the hills, there were a lot of people and they fed us rice with yogurt and saffron.
I headed across the bay but when I got to the Haight I was too late. I found a crash pad where a young woman was shooting up water. I tried to score some weed and the guy said give him the money and he'd be right back but I didn't believe him. “Here, hold this blotter acid till I get back then,” he said so I gave him the fifteen bucks. He dumped the worthless paper in my hand and I never saw him again. I went over to Delores Park and saw the mime troupe, then I saw the 14-year-old Guru Mararaji speak and finally scored a lid on Guerrero Street. I found another crash pad but it was a house full of predatory homosexuals. As soon as I sat down one unzipped my fly, took it out and gave me a blow job. When it was quickly over I ran out of there in shock and fear and shame. (I bet they had a good laugh.)
I was talking to various nice hippie ladies in the neighborhoods of San Francisco, trying to find out where a commune was up north that I could presumably join. I was writing down names of towns in my little notebook and one woman said try Garberville. I got out of the city and encountered Shawn on the Highway 101 onramp in San Rafael. He had just gotten out of San Quentin and was heading North with two duffle bags. He was short, stocky and tattooed with long red hair and beard. He wore an amulet and had a stash too.
“Let's twist one up,” he said. “I'm going up to Nooning Creek, Whitethorn. People are living naked on the creek. The trees talk to me.”
Sounded good to me.
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