“What’s that?” I asked of tablets in a baggie she held up to me.

“Acid,” Ruth replied. ”I took it from Ben’s stash, when I knew I was really moving out. It’s very good. Wanna take some tonight?”

Already her body was a miracle to me. She was my second lover.

“Yeah,” I murmured.

We were in my cramped, dingy bedroom in the Mission District flat I shared with three other San Francisco State students in the spring of 1967. Tonight was the one-week anniversary of her moving in with me. I was just a year and a half out of a redneck Sierra milltown, and by comparison, Ruth, three years older and from New York, was a sophisticated woman. This invitation to share the acid was only the latest in what seemed unending surprises from her.

Like when she wouldn’t give me her address, even after we started having sex. She said she was moving and would give me the new one when she got it. When I asked for her phone number she said she didn’t have a phone. I accepted all this as just another inscrutable quirk of chicks, those aliens from another gender. I always knew if I really wanted it, I could find her address in the student directory at San Francisco State, where we had met in a philosophy class. And that day I was ripped off for the ninety dollars she gave me to buy her a kilo of grass, I really wanted her address.

So I made a special trip across town by streetcar and copied her address and the number of the phone she supposedly didn’t have from a directory for sale in the student bookstore. Then I took another streetcar to her house in Diamond Heights. Throughout these rides I was writhing and sighing with humiliation and despair. When I got off the streetcar at Castro Street, I didn’t wait for the connecting bus but took off on foot, indifferent to the bite of the evening wind. Propelled by anguish, my long strides gobbled hills. When I eventually pressed the doorbell of her restored Victorian, I was panting.

“Ruth here?” I asked the guy who opened the door: blonde, lean, mid twenties, tie loosened.

“Yeah. She’s in the kitchen.” He turned toward the kitchen. “Ruth!” Then back to me. “C’mon in.” Then back to the kitchen. “Somebody here to see you!”

I stepped around him and saw the kitchen, through the tasteful living room and tasteful dining room, and took off for it. When Ruth saw me, she stared an incredulous instant, and then threw her head back and laughed uproariously. I surprised even myself by taking her in my arms and kissing her. Her stifled laughter gurgled under the kiss as her eyes went to the enraged, speechless blonde guy pacing behind us.