The Summer of Love

CHAPTER ONE In my memory, that summer in the 60’s lasted a whole year long, beginning in January when I first arrived in San Francisco. Flying free from restraints, I was sky-high on drugs, and s*x and rock and roll—a runaway with a mission to soar like a bird, to run my soul naked in the park, kiss bums on the cheek, and hand out flowers on street corners, in the only city that mattered to an eighteen year old with wide eyes and long blonde hair and psychedelic granny dresses flowing in the breeze. There were no nightmarish acid trips or bummed out lovers, or regrets. My life was one long string of moments strung together like Christmas lights, merrily twinkling their way to infinity. Cruiser (Joel Staposki a former boyfriend—black curly hair, slight sexy build, and way too much intensity for me) drove us out of Bakersfield in his old Jalopy. Dropping me in Haight Ashbury, I didn’t see him again for a week. But then, I didn’t want to be found by him or anyone else. I suppose he shared the sentiment since he didn’t try very hard to find out where I landed. There was a poetry reading in the park that afternoon, and I was mesmerized by J.T. (that is Jack Thomas) Greenway, who, like a strolling troubadour, read with his eyes and hands and a look of lust and outrage on his face. He had subtly, and force, and keen blue eyes that, for just one brief moment, caught mine. I thought he would strip me naked—and I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have laid my life down for that man. The poem was Asia Rain, and that became my name. For a girl from the wilted plains of Bakersfield, Asia and rain were both fine things to dream on. They were like stars in a never ending array of fantasies to take me beyond myself. When the reading was over, J.T. Greenway stuffed his backpack with his poetry and strolled away with a wave of his hand dismissing his minions. “Mr. Greenway!” I called after him with the enthusiasm of a ten year old, rising out of a crowd of twenty hippies sitting crossed-legged on the lawn. He turned to me looking cocky and gruff. Such embarrassment swept me, my face red, all I could think to say was “thank-you.” Then he left as I watched his lanky form move off with a determined and earthy grace. What to do about my first night in San Francisco—that was solved in seconds when Corey Ellison Roberts tapped me on the shoulder. I had a feeling I’d say yes to anything this inconstant Hippie asked once his effusive bubble of energy moved through mine. He towered over me, his long hair in curls the color of straw, catching the afternoon sun so it gleamed like a halo. My eyes dove into his—his hot and sharp, greedy, passionate and charismatic eyes that would circle around me in one glance, his body seizing everything his eyes left behind. “You have a place to stay?” he asked. “No. A friend came with me but he hasn’t showed.” I looked around as if expecting the missing Cruiser to appear any second. “My flat’s a block away. Wanna come? Good grass and a pot of soup.” “Sure.” “I’m Corey. There’s Bird and me and Nan and Blossom in the flat, but there’s lots of room for more.” “I’m Asia Rain,” I said. He nodded, noting the reference to Greenway’s poem. “Far-out.” Taking one of my pigtails in his hand, he fingered my hair as though he had electricity in his hands. I jumped. “You dig J.T., huh?” “Yeah, he was magic, wasn’t he?” “You a poet too?” “Aren’t we all?” I smiled. Corey, with broad shoulders and a mind-boggling ass in his cut-off jeans, slipped an arm around me like he owned me, and I nestled inside him, knowing this was my world now. I was Asia Rain and would be making love tonight in a San Francisco flat, under strobe lights, with the aroma of world’s best grass tickling my nostrils. My dreams were made for this kind of moment. *** Corey and I smoked a joint while listening to the Doors, and talking over candlelight about poetry and J. T. Greenway and the Kama Sutra. He began to touch me softly on the face, running fingers on my cheeks and lips. My virgin body shivered, wet excitement collecting between my thighs. The line of sensation he ran from my lips to my neck didn’t stop there, but on its own made a trail down my belly where I spasmed like firecrackers were shooting off one by one into the lazy nighttime sky of my insides. His roommates would come and go behind us in the dark but there was just the world of our eyes meeting, and then our lips. The first taste of his were sensuous and sweet. I could smell the pungent grass and traces of tobacco and the hint of some herbs he rubbed into his skin. I took another taste, then watched as his tee shirt went over his head, my eyes fixed on the smooth surface of his chest and one small tattoo in the shape of a Celtic cross on his pec. There were traces of his manly blonde hair rising above the shining surface of his skin. I was all jittery touching him the first time, fingertips barely grazing that expanse of muscled flesh. I wanted to ooze my way on to him, writhe my belly snake-like into his groin. His kisses covered my face, burrowed about my neck so I was gasping for air and any fresh breath my lungs could find. When he lifted my dress away, my nakedness startled me and made me too embarrassed to look in his eyes. As Corey’s hand reached for my left breast, I pulled back stunned. “It’s okay, babe, gentle as a lamb, gentle as a lamb,” his caressing voice was as soft as his fondling hand, and yet his flesh was more insistent than his words. Corey, seeking me with tongue and lips, I lay back against the mattress on the floor with him devouring the scent of me as he raised my breasts between his tender palms. He held the two mountainous handfuls and squeezed them tightly, not letting go, pouring his energy into them. All in me quaked nervously, but behind that was a pulsing deep within, some abiding force—a pushing, demanding body cry that fused with Corey’s fire—like we were being launched. My thighs, like a thousand years of innate breeding instinct was compelling me onward, fell wide apart, my p***y splayed as an offering to the gods of procreation and Corey’s lust. With one rude thrust, he pressed a mean d**k into the untried space at my body’s apex and I whimpered nervously. Did he realize he had a virgin beneath his hips? “Easy, baby, easy,” he purred to me so sweetly I was soothed, weeping for joy in my first womanly act. “Oh, yes, god, please,” I was praying to him as his p***s hit me far inside myself. As though a swarming host of birds had just been startled by some unseen prey, fluttering wings of sensation rose like I was being hunted and devoured. We banged together in the wonder of that moment, pain and passion exchanging places, then for seconds running side by side with exhilarating smiles. When Corey climaxed, dropping seed deep enough to find my womb, my channel wrung his shooting p***s, squeezing every drop from his insides until he collapsed limp against my chest, a hand absently caressing one pillow-soft breast. It might have been over then, except for the way his hand meandered low, and his body pulled off mine, huddling close. I began to pant again, revived. As his fingers probed the heat between my thighs, he moved down on me with a tongue that wound wicked circles about my untried clit. I jerked in an instant while he began to suck the orgasm from the inside out. “That’s the way, baby,” I heard him say. “Yeah, you’re so hot, let this sweet thing c*m,” and he devoured my wet cunt more. He wouldn’t stop, even though I thought the peak had come and gone. Another came on its heels—this second one more wild, like it had its own mind and its own place to travel on the night. *** I happily became Corey’s girl—the one he strolled with down the street, danced with naked in the dark, and felt up in the shadows of the city park. We made music in bed, and he tickled me silly when he was ready for a good laugh, then sometimes bruised me with a tongue like a battering ram when he was pissed. It didn’t matter even then—when he was brutal. I liked the fire in his eyes and even that bruising tongue. It made me horny to be humiliated, as though I liked feeling powerless. Though sometimes I ran from him crying—and Nan, our earth-mother roommate, would defend my wilted honor. “Don’t get hassled, Nan,” he barked at her. “She likes being chattel to me.” “You are a male chauvinist pig!” Nan blared back. He laughed at her and moseyed on his way. Motioning to me, I padded to his side just to feel him swoop down, and gather me inside the shelter of his arms. Everything in my world was colored, composed and arranged by Corey Ellison Roberts, who had two degrees from Berkeley, and then dropped out of engineering to pursue music and good grass, women’s thighs and my enlightenment—so it would seem. He taught me everything because he was a genius and knew everything thing there was to know. I fused with him as though attached to his right hip. Corey expected me to be with him all hours of the day or night. Even when he was pissed I stayed close, never too far, or out of sight, but subdued and withdrawn, waiting for him to want me again. I took to writing poetry and dreaming of Jack Thomas Greenway. I wrote poems for Corey, but the special ones I saved for J.T.. When I found the poet’s Seattle address in a rag newspaper, I mailed the best to him in a long passionate letter about poetry and Alan Ginsburg, and Yeats and Cummings, and every poet I could think of that might impress the man. On the sky, you and I float into breezes like flowers lifted in the sunshine plucked by wind carried on currents to land somewhere behind the place we dream where songs are sweet and we are one from where we’ll fly again, you and I to another lofty shore J.T. was the passion behind my life, not what I lived, but what I nurtured at midnight when I was awake and alone, or just snuggled with Corey’s chest behind me, him breathing heavily with sleep, me waiting for his arms to let go so I could slumber without the encumbrance of him crowding my visions. Of course I expected nothing in return for my efforts to commune with my poet. But I had my dreams. After a month together, Corey decided I could wait tables at a coffee house a few blocks up the street. I was out of cash and he never had enough to share with me. Our roommate Blossom worked there too—a shiny red-cheeked woman with rosy lips, sharp snapping eyes and a great laugh. She was like Nan, mothering me because I was the youngest. But mostly she was Bird’s lover, following the gangly guitar-player from gig to gig. The night Blossom and I stayed to talk Vietnam with two draft-resisters down from Canada, my mind went to the edges, thinking of war and revolution—like it was imminent. I listened to their rhetoric, understanding peace and war in ways I never had before. I sometimes wondered why Corey never talked Vietnam, or went to rallies, or let me speak about it. Our little flat lived in a warless world while the leader of our pack would scowl if some mention of another world would cloud the conversation. I was easy with this omission, too stoned on love to think otherwise. But my mind worked busily, once I heard talk that sent my brain whirring ninety miles an hour into places it had never probed. My opinions were a mystery even to myself, and speaking them, my words sounded strange. But these companions listened as intently as I listened to them. Something erotically electric moved me—that, and the way their eyes stared at my heavy breasts moving underneath my dress.