August 10, 2002

• I haven’t blogged for a while; wonder if I still have readers.

  Another shot at SuSu psychoanalyzing herself:

  Until now, the analysis has been easy.  Childhood trauma,
  grief, guilt and rejection; inadequacy and self-doubt arising from
  congenital illness as well as some errors in judgment, fairly well
  account for whatever kinks and quirks can’t be accounted for by
  addictions to sex and sugar.

  School, where I had been the “new kid” in one town after another,
  and so slow and uncoordinated that I was always the last one picked for
  team sports, followed by my first two marriages and three kids I
  couldn’t care for adequately, left me with lousy self-esteem.  I
  propped it up with ego, as many of us do.  I played to my
  strengths and tried to ignore or deny the weaknesses.  The biggest
  weakness, of which I was unaware at the time, was the need for external
  validation and approval.

  With the bikers I earned approval through outrageous behavior (what
  they called, “showing class”), courage, mechanical skill, food and
  wine, and my long thick naturally wavy coppery red hair.  Odd
  combination, that.  One does what one can, I suppose.  In
  recalling these memoirs I came to a realization about another factor I
  hadn’t thought about at the time:  trust. 

  The Free Souls took me out on their dope deals, had me carry the
  money and/or drugs.  Part of their motivation there was my
  gender.  Women were expendable and the male cops (all there were
  at the time) were not allowed to search a female suspect.  There
  were other women they could have taken, but they trusted me to keep my
  cool, not rat them out, not blow the deal.  I was treated, in many
  instances, with the same respect they accorded each other.

  Likewise, Steve the paranoid speed chemist/wholesaler turned me into
  his personal assistant, appointment secretary and house-sitter. 
  That was a real win-win deal.  He’d park me at his place when he
  left town and I would have several days of enjoyable solitude with
  plenty of entertainment, dope to keep me happy while I was there and
  bonus drugs when he returned.  All I had to do was answer the
  phone and an occasional knock at the door, and relay messages to the
  right people.

  I knew there was some status conferred by those positions of trust,
  but I hadn’t considered the matter of trust in itself.  Now I’m
  wondering how it all came about, what they saw in me that engendered
  trust, and if there is a deeper meaning to any of it.  Still
  thinking…. [and, three years later, having thought about it some
  more, I guess that even at my most fucked-up I had some integrity that
  could be observed or sensed by those who were at least as fucked up as
  I was.]

  I’m sitting here laughing at myself as I run several alternative
  strings of words through my head and realize how ludicrious some of
  them sound.  For example, “After my first psychedelic experiences,
  I became erratic.”  As if I hadn’t been erratic before that! 
  I guess what happened when I started tripping was that the set of rules
  by which I had lived began to break down.

  One biggie was the myth of male superiority.  This was the time
  when Women’s Liberation was starting to get some press.  At the
  Miss America Pageant in 1968, a group of demonstrators put out a
  “freedom trash can” where women could throw their girdles and
  bras.  Although it wasn’t set on fire, the media drew upon the
  anti-war burnings of draft cards and flags, and called it a “bra
  burning.”  I remember how funny it seemed to a bunch of us braless
  “hippie chicks” who had quietly dumped our underwear a few years
  before.  Bouncing breasts and NO panty lines for us.  Even
  so, the very public rise of the Women’s Movement got me to thinking
  about the many times I’d obeyed some man and gone against my better
  judgment to my eventual regret.

  I had been working very hard to fit into the biker life, and acid
  made it impossible to ignore the fact that I would never really
  fit.  I might have made a good biker if I’d had the proper outside
  plumbing, but as a woman I’d always be a misfit there. 
  Interestingly enough, I got no arguments on this from VW.  Even
  though he still slapped me around to make me do what he wanted, he
  recognized my intellectual abilities and other skills and had as much
  respect for me as he could have for any woman.  At times he might
  have yearned for the simplicity of having an ol’lady who acted as one
  was supposed to act, but he was proud nonetheless to have one who stood
  out from the pack.

  He didn’t want to let me go, and when he started seeing Phyllis, a
  woman who was apparently also able to get his dick hard, I even felt
  some jealousy and insecurity.  So, for a while, we were held
  together by our mutual psychopathology.  That changed radically
  with the clarity of personal insight we gained from psychedelics and
  the chemical courage of speed.  In my case, the changes were of a
  more long-term nature.  We would have long intense raps while
  high.  We would agree then that our relationship really wasn’t
  working.  I’d start packing, and then he’d come down and beat me
  or lock me up and tell me I was never going to leave him.

  And this is where my mother comes in.  She and I had been
  distant for years.  Estranged would be putting it too
  strongly.  I’d simply been deeply involved in a lifestyle totally
  alien to her and had been writing to her very infrequently.  Acid
  changed that.  One of the things I used to do on those acid
  weekends was call my mother.  I talked and talked, told her things
  I knew she’d rather not hear.  I was frank and open, both things
  she paid lip service to, laid claim to but never practiced.  Years
  later, on the last visit I made to her before she died, she said it had
  been great hearing from me but there had been things said that she’d
  rather not have heard.  Her voice broke a little, but as usual she
  held the emotion in.  Except for when she was drunk, once that my
  father yelled at her, and for a few weeks following my fathers death
  when she was totally undone, I never saw her cry.

  When I told Mama that I wanted to leave my husband but that he
  wouldn’t cooperate and I had no money of my own nor anywhere to go, she
  said I could always come home to her in Kansas.  One day, I did…
  at least I started in that direction.  I got out on the highway
  headed east while VW was at work.  I had a small bag with a
  change of clothes and a little tin box of beads and a spool of
  dental floss.  I hitchhiked, and I strung “love beads” as I rode
  and gave them to the drivers who gave me rides.

  In New Mexico, I swear I think I got a ride with Henry Lee
  Lucas.  It was this hillbilly type in an old truck.  I’ve
  seen pictures and heard audiotape of Lucas, and they fit.  He
  picked me up on an Interstate near sundown, and then took the next
  exit.  I didn’t like the look of him or the vibes, but I had
  gotten in anyhow because it was late and I was tired and hungry.
   I knew hitching was illegal there and I wanted to get gone from
  that state before I got busted.  I figured I could handle him if I
  had to.  When he finally pulled to a stop and demanded sex, I got
  out and headed across a cornfield toward a group of buildings, and he
  drove away.

  It was quite a walk back to the Interstate, and I spent the night in
  a roadside culvert.  The next day, still hungry and getting
  dirtier, sweatier and grubbier by the moment, I was rousted by state
  cops.  I hadn’t had my thumb out, or they might have taken me
  in.  Instead, they poked along behind as I walked to the next gas
  station.  They told me if I wanted to walk alongside the road, to
  pick something besides the Interstate and stay on the side facing
  oncoming traffic.  They suggested that I stay at the gas station
  until I could find someone going my way.

  The farther I got from the West Coast, the more out-of-place I
  felt.  These Middle-Americans didn’t speak my language and they
  looked at me like I was an alien.  The men were all short-haired
  and clean shaven (a style I still don’t particularly care for in
  men–now that I’m older, I don’t mind if they are bald, but natural
  facial hair [not just eyebrows] is important, for more reasons
  than mere aesthetics) and they spoke scathingly of long-haired hippies,
  Libbers, and war protestors.  Three strikes for me, right there.

  I was in that gas station a few hours and talked to a few drivers
  headed east, but none of them wanted a passenger.  The attendants
  at the station pointed me out to a trucker who had no problem with
  giving me a ride.  The only problem with that was that he was
  headed for Eugene, Oregon.  I got in his truck after letting him
  buy me a burger, and slept all the way back to Eugene.

  [minimally revised, edited for accuracy, with a few newly-surfaced memories added, on 10/21/2005]

  • 5:26 pm
  • 12 Comments