Bernie's Big Secret  

9

 

When I met Jennie and Bernie, they were at that stage of a break-up where they were getting separate apartments. Both spoke with absolute certainty that the relationship was dead, though they saw each other nearly every day. Bernie seemed reconciled, even relieved that it was finally over, and that was why I was so surprised when, responding to a casual question about Jennie one afternoon at my apartment, he said:

“Don’t athk (ask) me about huh (her). I want to kee-oo huh (kill her).”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He stared at me a moment then turned away and punched a palm and spat: “I could kee-oo huh.”

I knew better than to ask again. But his vehemence stunned me into almost believing he meant what he said. I thought their relationship had cooled beyond that, and jealousy seemed unlikely in light of all their sexual experimentation.

Bernie was one of the founders of the Sexual Freedom League, mainly a front to help the founders get laid. Once Jenny told me with a chuckle that she couldn’t keep up with Bernie’s sexual experimentation. They once had an arrangement where each would have a lover come to their apartment, the four would have dinner, then Bernie would take his lover to one room and Jenny take hers to another, and later the lovers would leave and Bernie and Jenny would go to bed together.

Jenny and I had a friendship independent of Bernie, so there was nothing unusual about my visiting her the night after Bernie declared his desire to kill her. She moved out of the place she shared with him into a Lower Haight Street flat with a couple roommates. While she and I were rapping on the living room couch, I was alert for an opportunity to ask her about Bernie’s rage. Then we were on our way to her bedroom, away from the kitchen and her roommates’ chatter, so I could hear her poetry.

The room was richly decorated with the best of the Haight Street paraphernalia store where she worked. My scan of the books on the bottom shelf of the nightstand lowered my hopes for the poetry: Ginsburg, Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book ( beat sex poems that were convicted of obscenity), the Baghavad Gita, Autobiography of a Yogi. No serious poetry. She got a sheaf of poems from a bureau drawer and we sat side by side on the bed and she read a couple. It was just as I feared: free-verse rock lyrics. When she finished, I scrounged for comments.

Eventually I blurted out, “Ya know, Bernie came over the other day, and he was so angry with you . . . “

“Oh, I know . . .”

“I’ve never seen him so upset . . .”

“I know . . .”

“He was . . . crazy. Or, at least, crazier than normal. What happened?”

“I don’t know. Really. I don’t know what he’s angry about. He won’t tell me.” (That she wouldn’t even guess made it seem she was holding something back.)

Suddenly, with inches between us on her bed, I had a realization, and I knew she was having it at the same time: there was no reason why we couldn’t have sex. There had always been an ignored mutual attraction. Sex wouldn’t have even occurred to me while they were together, but they weren’t. A locked door between she and I suddenly swung open.

The silence became noticeable. She was looking up at the ceiling with a slight, expectant smile. She wore hiphugger bellbottom jeans and a low-cut imported blouse that hung in folds over her braless breasts. I could have sworn I heard my jeans stretch.

She was plain-pretty with a plumpish body. Her pale skin was finely freckled and her eyes were cornflower blue. Her long fine straight brown hair was all bangs and stray strands. She had a girlish, vulnerable smile that could suddenly turn impish as prelude to a witty, barbed aside. Any man of worth would have to be at least a little in love with her. One who was quite a bit more than a little in love with her was her boss, once the owner of the first Haight-Ashbury coffeehouse and now the owner of the largest head shop on Haight Street .

Then, as if it was something to do while waiting for me to make my move, she leaned over and slid the folded pages of her poetry between some books on the bottom shelf of the nightstand. Her blouse, of the same material as the bedspread, now hung open on the bottom revealing a hanging breast and a conical, pink nipple.

It was only later that I thought of all the good reasons not to have sex. If Bernie hated her that much then he still loved her, no matter what he said. I felt too much for her to have just casual sex and being in love with her would have been even more complicating.

Jenny and I didn’t make love, not because reason triumphed and I persuaded myself not to, but because I couldn’t. I had a debilitating panic attack. I “tuned out.” This was a paralysis that could ambush me anywhere, anytime, even without provocation. A condition that had changed little in the several years since I left the mental hospital.

The pressure of the situation caused a bottomless vacillation, making decision impossible for anything except flight. I became encased in a tense silence, finally managing a gulp. She broke the tension by standing up. I too then stood up and I could see she was surprised. Was this the opening or the closing act?

“I have to go,” I murmured. “I have to be . . . I’m late . . . “

I backed away, erection at a painful angle, struggling not to reach down and fix it. I opened the door and stared at her, trying to think of something to say, certain it would be the wrong thing. She recovered herself, smiled ruefully and then nodded, not so much in goodbye as in agreement that she and I were unworkable.

From that day on, every time we were alone, there was clumsiness and charged glances, and we were around each other a lot, because, within a couple months of that night, Bernie and Jenny were married. I was best man. It was winter and their honeymoon was a train loop through western states, a couple days of sex on LSD in a private car with snowbound America flowing by the steamed windows.

After such a rupture, their marriage seemed a raising of the dead. That Bernie loved her, he proved by the intensity of his hate. But what about her? What kind of feelings could she have for him after all that? I knew she wanted a child, and she became pregnant almost immediately. But she also seemed to be fleeing that bone-chilling loneliness I saw in myself and others in their mid twenties. As if to prove it, at about the time of the wedding, she joined the “Family.” More commune than cult, it centered on “Father,” a self-declared god-realized Indian who peddled a generic Hinduism.

The Family took up several apartment buildings on the outskirts of the Fillmore District. It was a measure of their mellowness that Bernie and I, who openly mocked them, were accepted as unofficial members. With his love of a good scam, Bernie started a running joke between he and I about Father.

“Owa big mithtake wath (Our big mistake was) that we didn’t claim to be God,” he would mutter.