August 11, 2002

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  After about two and a half years with the outlaw biker I’ve been calling VW, I started trying to get away from him. I was economically and emotionally dependent on him, and I can see that he had similar bonds to me. I’d had jobs off and on and even when I didn’t work outside the house, I performed valuable services, including all his paperwork and nearly all the mechanical work on car and bikes. There was, I’m sure, an additional ego factor in hanging onto any ol’lady and especially one who could ride and wrench and hold her mud better than some men, with the biker brand of class to spare.

  
  

  On the other hand, behind closed doors VW had let down his guard with me many times. If I were out of his life, he’d have a better chance at being (or pretending and appearing to be) the man of his fantasies. He was in an identity crisis spawned by the psychedelic drugs. This was about a year into it, after weekend trips spaced about two weeks apart for the most part. We had talked about our realities and our masks, and we had talked about the big things: love, spirituality, social and cultural values, and ideals. One place where we were in complete agreement was about our basic mutual incompatibility. But usually, in the cold light of the straight-and-sober mornings after or under the effects of depressant drugs (which I had stopped taking entirely after an acid trip or two) VW was not willing to let me go.

  
  

  I had a dog, my precious kitchen gadgets, some valued books and other impedimenta, so it was a true act of desperation that sent me hitching practically empty-handed toward Kansas and my mother. I don’t recall if any single event precipitated it, or if I’d just decided it had to be and might as well be now. The latter feels more like the right idea, but that could just be my current self looking at it, not the girl I used to be, making the decision and taking off.

  
  

  If desperation took me east, revulsion and resignation brought me back to the West Coast. Any casual acquaintance and most total strangers on the streets or in the coffeehouse or at the U of O Student Union were more to my liking and more of my mindset than my midwestern family and old friends. The Aquarian Age had washed up on the shores of Amerika, and had just started seeping inland.

  
  

  I was back in Eugene for a few days before VW found out. I crashed on the balcony at one of the upstairs units of a two-story fourplex. It was a crash pad shared by maybe a dozen or more of the nickle and dime dealers I’d met around the fishbowl and the coffeehouse. I’d picked up some poison oak or ivy somewhere, and a skinny yellow mutt who had whelped a litter of pups under the porch and then been adopted by the household, kept coming over to me and trying to lick the running sores on my legs. I pushed her away at first, but she whined and struggled and her tongue felt so good on my itchy legs that I relented. She worked on the legs for at least an hour, and came back once afterward to lick the new discharge from some of the bigger lesions. The sores cleared up in a day after she got her fill of the gooey golden discharge.

  
  

  There was a free concert one night after I’d been back in town a while. The Grateful Dead played with about an hour’s notice in a ballroom at the Student Union. I stood down front and grooved, and even if I hadn’t been tripping, it would have been a splendid experience. The band and the crowd were all in that groove that only the Dead ever achieved in quite that way. I was high as much on the music as on the acid. I gazed awestruck at the percussionists and rode on their energy, then just happened to make eye contact with Ace. Bob Weir was always my favorite Dead. I kept a poster of him stuck to the wall at the end of my bathtub, where I could look into his eyes during my long bubble baths. There in the ballroom, he acknowledged the eye contact with a big grin and a nod, then mouthed, “tripping?” I nodded and grinned back, and he signaled the band and they went into a long improvisational instrumental groove that I knew was for me. I dug it.

  
  

  This part of the story is what had me stuck for a few days, trying to sort out chronology and detail. I’m not sure how long I had been back, for one thing. I spent at least three nights at that crash pad, maybe more. I’m guessing that the Dead was in town for a stadium concert, but I can’t be sure of that. I know that Alice Cooper was the opening act at a stadium concert not long after that intimate free Dead concert at the Student Union. Whether the main act was the Grateful Dead or another band, I don’t recall. The stadium show had barely started, and I was seeing Alice Cooper and hearing his music for the very first time, when I was grabbed from behind by four bikers and dragged out of the stadium.

  
  

  The place they took me, the new Black Ravens clubhouse, was the fourplex downstairs at the opposite end of the building from the crash pad where I had been staying. How could I have failed to notice the bikers coming and going, or evade being seen by one of them? Who knows? I’m just the storyteller here. Maybe I did notice them and kept my head down. A lot of the missing pieces from this time are state-bound memories, and I prefer to just leave the blanks there rather than get back into that state of mind. Maybe later, who knows? If so, it will show up in the book when it’s done.

  
  

  Being “on the lam” and trying to stay undercover in my own home town was an anxious time, and there was some relief  of that anxiety for me in being caught. VW had put out the word I was “missing” and so the guys who saw me at the concert felt they had the liberty to rough me up. I was hogtied and gagged when VW showed up to retrieve me. There was a lot of dramatic talk about turning me out for running away. Before the acid, it would have terrified me. I knew they were not going to turn me out, though. I knew the talk was just to scare me. If VW had said so, they would have turned me out, but he wasn’t going to, and I knew it all along.

  
  

  What he did was say he needed to think it over a while, and took me into a back bedroom. He played tough guy and I played along. I massaged him, and gave him one of my primo blowjobs.

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  You Are a Blowjob Queen!

  You are a Blowjob Queen. That’s right – you are a total blowjob master. You give the best blowjobs in town. In fact, you could be considered a modern Linda Lovelace. Your reputation preceeds you, but that’s okay. Men shower you with gifts to get close to those lips.
  
  
  

  What Kind of Queen Are *You*?

   
  

  [This quiz fell into my inbox from the Diva a few days ago. I took it without knowing that Blowjob Queen was one of the possible results. I hesitated to post it for the same reason that I seldom yield to the urge to crow about this particular claim to fame: taste (no pun intended). However, if there is ever going to be a spot in this narrative where it is appropriate to blow my own horn (to coin a phrase) on this particular tune, this is it.]

  
  

  Then I let him give me head. After he brought me to orgasm he wanted to talk about how much we needed each other. He was drinking a little beer but wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t enjoying being drunk so much anymore and had developed a marked preference for speed over any of the depressants. There was a speed shortage in Eugene just then. While I had been away, that lab in the Utah desert had exploded. I know that Steve’s brother died at around this same time, but I’m not sure whether it was in the meth lab explosion or in a car accident. Whoever it was that said if you remember the sixties you weren’t really there did have a point, I guess.

  
  

  VW was bummed out about not being able to get any speed. The bikers had some reds (Seconal, downers), but VW wanted acid or speed. I knew that if anyone in town had any or could find it, it was The Hulk. I had seen him a few days before and he told me that he had rented a house just a few blocks from the fourplex where we were and where the Ravens were sitting around waiting to find out if I was going to be turned out. The house, Hulk had said, was where he was putting up eight or ten teeny-bopper runaway speed freaks who were doing the retail end of his dealing for him now.

  
  

  VW was ready to sleep. I thought that if I could get some acid or speed into him when he woke up, I could reason with him and get away again. I offered to go see The Hulk, told VW where he was living now. He kept my shoes, extracted a promise that I would not run away, gave me ten bucks, and told his bros to let me go. He broke the news to them that there would be no turnout, that I was his righteous ol’lady still.

  
  

  Some nervous kids answered the door and were hesitant about disturbing Hulk, who was asleep. I pleaded. They let me in, at least. They said he had given them strict orders not to awaken him and they were afraid to go into his room. I said I’d risk it, and they let me go in and wake him. I heard the  front door close and from the quiet that descended on the house I supposed that they had decided their safest course was to clear out and avoid the fallout.

  
  

  I sat on the bed and touched his arm. He sat up, flailing, and I ducked. I said, “Hulk, it’s just me, Kathy.” Mumbling and blinking into wakefulness, he found his pants and didn’t bother with a shirt or shoes. His smile was sweet and his voice conveyed empathy and compassion as I went through the explanation about my attempts to get away from the bikers. I said I thought that VW might lighten up and let me go if I got him some acid or speed. He said he didn’t have any.  Something had disrupted the pipeline for acid from the Bay Area weeks before, and since Steve’s lab blew up they had been having to collect enough cash for wholesale lots of meth, and drive to Portland to a bowling alley on the northeast edge of town to cop. For now, he was dry, except for some reds.

  
  

  Exhausted, frustrated, weary of the fight and the life, wanting desperately to be able to find and grasp some key to my liberation, I capped it all by embarrassing myself. Silent tears started to flow, my voice caught and I croaked out that reds wouldn’t help, thanks anyway. I got up to leave and he said, “no, sit down a minute.”

  
  

  He held my hand and we talked a little about my situation. He was thinking it over, trying to help me find a solution, when someone came in. One of his teeny-boppers was stressed out and in pain. She had been sobbing until her diaphragm was sore, on some sort of bummer. She had been talked down, was past the intense emotions that had triggered it, but was distressed and frightened by the pain in her chest and abdomen.

  
  

  Hulk started to walk her to her room, and asked me to come along. We walked her into a back bedroom, and over to the walk-in closet where she had a pallet on the floor. That was prime accomodations there, where a closet meant privacy. We lay Jeanne down on her pallet and stroked her arms and legs. Louvered doors covered the entire front of the closet, so with them open we could kneel side by side by her bed. With a minimum of talk, we settled her down with a massage. I held my left hand over her abdomen, which still spasmed occasionally. I sensed a cold spot, and laid my right hand on it. She shivered at the touch, relaxed, smiled and fell asleep. I turned toward Hulk and he was grinning at me. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he said. “Neither did I,” I answered.

  
  

  We left quietly, and back in his room, he suggested that I take some reds and get some sleep. I protested that I had to get back before VW woke up, and that even one red would put me too far out for too long. He laughed at my sensitivity to the drugs, and offered this solution: he’d take one red and half of the powder out of another one, and I could take half. Then I’d get some undisturbed sleep and if any bikers came looking for me, he’d deal with them. I watched as he poured a capsule and a half of barbiturate into a spoon, cooked it and ran it into a vein, and I swallowed the remaining half-full cap. I was tired enough that I didn’t really need it.

  
  

  Next day near noon I woke. There were several kids including my newest friend Jeanne in the dining room, but Hulk was gone. He had given them orders not to let me out of the house should I wake before he returned. They bodily blocked both exits until I relaxed into a chair to wait. They said he would be right back. Then they fell all over each other to tell the story of the biker confrontation I’d slept through that morning. Four Harleys had roared up in front of the house. Barefoot and shirtless, Hulk had gone out on the porch. He had told VW and his bros that I was there, and I was asleep, and he wasn’t going to let them wake me. He said  that when I woke he’d tell me they had been there.

  
  

  The bikers had left. The turn of events came as a pleasant surprise to me. I was even more delighted when Hulk got back. He was in a truck. Driving the truck was Page Browning, one of the original Merry Pranksters. Riding on top of the cab was Page’s dog, Sonntu, who was, I think, a great dane/ Irish wolfhound cross. Whenever the truck came to a stop, Sonntu would jump onto the hood, and would go back into the bed at highway speeds, but her (his?) position for cruising at low speeds in town was always right on top.

  
  

  Page had come, at Hulk’s request, to take me out to VW’s and my former home on the edge of town, to get my dog and my other possessions. And that’s another story….

  • 1:07 pm
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