It was March of 1967, and the whole universe seemed crescendoing toward the coming Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury, and it was getting increasingly more difficult to drag myself out to State. As the absences, the untaken tests, and the unwritten papers piled up, I realized I wasn’t going to finish the semester, which meant I wouldn’t be able to make my extortion payment of grades to the draft board.
I didn’t particularly like the philosophy class with Ruth. There were a couple of housewives who knitted in the back, wondering out loud annoying things like: “If Bishop Berkeley didn’t believe in the material world, how could he eat?” Nevertheless, it was the one class I never missed and only because of the bus rides afterwards.
We talked hungrily. Every ride we experienced new clicks of agreement like the tumblers in a combination lock. I found it amazingly easy to make her laugh.
The first time I asked if she wanted to come over to my place, she put me off with a smile and said, “No, I’ve got to get home and practice my narcolepsy.” I laughed hard and she liked that.
Since moving to the Bay Area, I had developed a finely-honed sense of hip and straight, becoming sensitive to latent straightness and the developmental stages of hip. I now automatically took a hipness reading of everyone I met.
One night, I leaned toward her in the bus seat and said, “Ya know something? You’re the hippest person I know.”
She looked at me and smiled then looked back out the window.
“Wanna come over to my place for a while?” I asked. “Maybe get stoned or something?”
She searched my eyes, smiled, and said, “All right.”
An hour later, stoned, with the kitchen table between us, I was wondering how I could kiss her.
“Really, my grandfather escaped from Russia in a basket on the back of a donkey,” she said, giggling at the melodrama of the image.
“So you’re Russian?”
“And Jewish. Where’s the bathroom?”
While savoring her muted tinkle, I scrambled for a way of introducing sex.
“Uh. . .” I said, after she returned.
She looked at me expectantly.
“Uh. . .how. . . how did you come out to California ?”
“I came out with a friend from Boston University. I told you about Cheryl?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And there was another friend, Alvin. The three of us came out together. Alvin’s black. Kind of a hustler. He’s illiterate, but he knows more about people, more about…living … than . . . anybody I’ve ever met.”
I felt a twinge of jealousy. I wanted that distinction in her eyes. It was obvious that, years later, she was still feeling the force of Alvin’s personality.
“Was he your ol’ man?”
She shrugged and said, “We had sex.”
“What happened to him?”
“The last I heard, he was back in Nyack, leading riots.”
I had run out of questions. The moment of truth had arrived. “Geronimo!” I thought as I got up, stepped around the table, and bent down. She turned with deliberate slowness and looked up at my face now inches above hers. I kissed her.
We parted and she said from a great stoned distance, “Kissing? I don’t want to kiss.”
