August 12, 2002

• The Hulk had asked Page Browning to bring his truck to town and help
  me move my stuff from VW’s place. I was feeling as if this all was too
  good to be true, and I was effusive in thanking Page for doing such a
  big mitzvah for a total stranger. He assured me that it was really no
  trouble at all, and sitting there straddling the stick-shift in that
  rusty old truck, I felt like the empress of the universe. I’d been so
  long with the bikers that a little bit of human kindness blew me away.

  When I got to my former home, my best friend Mardy was there. She
  and Loose Lew had just gotten back to town and she was glad to see me.
  She told me that Lew and VW were off somewhere together. She didn’t
  know when they would be back. She offered to help me pack my stuff and
  load the truck. When I asked her where my dog Bugger was, she said she
  hadn’t seen him since she’d been there.

  As Mardy packed my kitchen utensils and clothes, I walked around
  outside calling Bugger for a while, then I went into the storage shed
  behind the house to see what I wanted to take from there. As I searched
  the shelves and boxes, someone stepped into the doorway, blocking most
  of the light, and I turned to face VW. He had a pistol. All he said was
  that I wasn’t going anywhere. He backed outside, closed the door and
  put the padlock on it, locking me in. Then I heard him in conversation
  with Mardy. I could see his back through the small window in the door.
  I could hear their two voices, but her words were soft and indistinct,
  and I could understand only a few of his words when his voice rose in
  anger.

  As silently as possible, I opened the window at the back of the
  shed, got about halfway out of it and half-fell, half-leapt from the
  window to the fence of the neighbors’ back yard. Scrambling over the
  fence and expecting to be shot at any moment, I ran for the neighbor’s
  back door. I gave a few soft knocks, opened the door that had been left
  mercifully unlocked, called, “hello,” quietly, and walked in. With the
  door shut behind me, I called out a bit louder, and then walked from
  the mudroom into the kitchen and soon learned that the house was empty.
  I’d never been in the house before and didn’t know the people who lived
  there. Bikers, as a rule, aren’t particularly neighborly.

  I looked out the front windows and saw our VW bug parked next to
  Page’s truck. Page and Hulk were beside the truck, talking. Then Page
  pulled a handgun out from under the seat and they headed up the
  driveway and behind the house where I supposed VW was still holding
  Mardy at gunpoint as she tried to negotiate my release from the shed.
  Imagining mayhem and bloodshed, I overcame some strong anti-police
  programming and called the cops.

  Before they arrived, VW had been disarmed and the group had
  discovered the open window at the back of the empty shed. I watched
  through lace curtains as the cops talked to everyone. Already quite
  tense, I was close to panicking all over again when I saw Hulk, Page
  and Sonntu leave in the truck with some boxes of my belongings. Then
  one of the cops came and knocked on the door of the house where I was
  crouching in terror, clutching the phone, still talking to the police
  dispatcher who had steadily been trying to steady me.

  When I told her that the cop was at the door, she said to go ahead
  and hang up and answer the door. In a daze, I did, and when the other
  cop came over and they assured me I was safe, I accompanied them back
  to the house next door. The result of negotiations between Mardy, Page
  and Hulk, and VW, was that no mention was made to the cops of any gun,
  and none was found, having left in the truck. The story was that I must
  have seen the padlock in his hand and mistaken it for a gun. Yeah,
  right, then what did he use to lock the door? I argued a little bit.
  They pointed out that it was my word against that of four people. Okay,
  l Iet that go. It saved the cops paperwork and everyone a trip
  downtown, that story.

  The further negotiations after the cops arrived had arranged for me
  to take the VW bug to finish my moving, since VW had his bike to ride
  until I returned our car. The cops told me to go downtown and get a
  restraining order against my husband the next day. They told him not to
  try locking me up again, and cited the relevant statutes and penalties.
  Magnanimously, VW told me to go ahead and keep the car for a week, and
  I could be assured of his absence during daytime working hours so I
  could finish packing and moving, and continue looking for my dog, at
  leisure. I hugged Mardy, said a shaky goodbye, and drove away in the
  bug.

  I never unpacked most of my stuff at the teeny-bopper crash pad.
  Hulk met me at the curb when I pulled up in the bug, showed me where my
  boxes of stuff were stacked in the screened back porch, and led me to
  his room at the front of the house. He took me in his arms. Hulk was a
  great hugger. He was sweet and deferent. He asked me if I would go to
  bed with hiim, and it was both invitation and plea. Not crudely, but in
  a very Virgoan way,  without guile or seductiveness, he explained
  how much he wanted me and how long he had been watching me with barely
  adequate self-restraint. He trembled as he said it. Wow! How could I
  say no?

  We must have been kinda vocal. Or maybe we simply reeked of it when
  we joined the teeny-boppers around the dining room table. In that
  house, there was always a gaggle of chairs, boxes, small cable spools,
  upended suitcases and one high stool, gathered around the big round
  table in the middle of the house. Usually most seats were occupied, and
  someone was continually rolling and passing joints. Weed was essential
  to keep the speed freaks from amping right out. Maybe one speed freak
  in a hundred likes to be wired. For most of us, it is an undesirable
  side-effect. Weed takes the wired out and leaves the buzz and the
  clarity and the fastness of speed. I think it was Ken Kesey who said that speed + weed = acid. I’ts not exactly equal in my estimation, but close enough.

  There were giggles and meaningful looks around the table, and after
  we toked up with the kids Hulk suggested that we take a walk. We headed
  east toward Skinner’s Butte. On the way, we passed a telephone pole at
  the end of an alley, with a sign on it, “apartment for rent,” with an
  arrow pointing down the alley. It was in the right general direction to
  take us to the park, so we walked down the alley. The little converted
  garage was cute, and next to it in the landlord’s back yard was an
  apple tree heavy with fruit, some of it ripe but most still ripening.

  Hulk said, “Let’s look at it,” and we knocked on the landlord’s
  door. He showed us the place, and when I complimented him on the apple
  tree, he picked up a windfall apple, polished it on his red plaid
  sleeve and handed it to me. It was delicious… well it was really
  Macintosh, but scrumptious, if you know what I mean. There was a little
  leanto kitchen tacked onto the back of the old garage, with a dropleaf
  table and two chairs, with a toilet and shower behind a curtain at one
  end. In the room that once had held the family car, there was an old
  wooden dresser and an expanse of bare floor. We told the old guy we’d
  think it over, and walked on up to the park. Hulk asked me if I’d stay
  with him. Thinking, “What? You think I’m nuts enough to say no to
  YOU?”, I smiled and said, “yes.” He said he thought we’d be a lot more
  comfortable in a place of our own with some privacy, and since it was
  only a block and a half from the crash pad, he could take care of
  business with the teenies from our hideaway in the alley.

  Walking fast, we went back and gave the old man two months’ rent,
  then walked back to the teenie’s crash pad to arrange the move. Glenn
  Vaughn was there with his 1940′s vintage canary yellow Chevy. He and a
  half dozen or so teeny-bopper runaway speed freaks helped us move my
  boxes and go out to VW’s place and pick up more of my stuff. I took the
  mattress I’d bought for my little house on the California ranch after
  being evicted when Jim Rose had tossed me out. I had an old framed
  mirror from a flea market, and some floor pillows Carol and I had
  picked up to furnish our little ranch house. Bugger still didn’t show
  up. I took one last look around and shut the door on my life with VW
  and bikers.

  Hulk and I finally shut the door on our departing helpers and fell
  on the mattress together for some fun before getting back up to unpack
  and put some things away. I picked up the mirror, looked around for the
  best place to put it. Hulk’s gaze crossed mine and we looked up
  together, to the ceiling over the mattress. We stuck the mirror up
  there with double-stick tape, and then watched ourselves getting naked
  and sweaty and into each other.

  In her book, Sun Signs, Linda Goodman said that when you’re
  alone in a room with a Virgo and a mirror, the Virgo is more likely to
  talk to the mirror than to you. I had always enjoyed watching myself
  dance in the mirrors behind the bar, when I was topless a go-go at The
  Shadows. I really got off on watching myself pleasuring The Incredible
  Hulk while he watched himself pleasuring me. Sometimes our glances met.
  Laughter hadn’t been a part of the sexual experience for me for a long
  time. Now, laughter was part of everything. I recall one time during
  those first few days, just lying beside Hulk with my head on his
  chest, I started giggling from pure joyous relief in my newfound
  freedom. He wrapped his arms around me and joined in the laughter.

  Hulk’s dog, Smoky, a Norwegian elkhound, accepted me totally. I put
  out the word that my dog, Bugger, was missing. Although I heard a few
  reports of a dog who looked like him being seen in town, I never found
  him.

  Next day we went to the dime store and got more double-stick tape
  and 12 mirror tiles, each one a foot square. With lots of giggling and
  tickling we stuck the new mirror squares around the old mirror with its
  ornate wooden frame. Then, of course, we had to try out the
  full-length-mirror effect.   A
  few weeks after we put it up there
  and surrounded it with all those mirror tiles, the framed one
  fell.  We
  were both asleep at the time, and it was a funny scene of
  confusion.  Sleepily, I looked at Hulk and asked, “Why did you hit
  me?”   Shocked, he said, “I didn’t!”  Then we noticed the
  mirror lying on top of us. 
  It cracked, but stayed in the frame, no shards in our bed.  We
  didn’t try to stick it back on
  the ceiling with double-stick tape again.  We just rearranged the
  mirror tiles.]

  Several times a day we’d hop up from our fun, shower together in
  laughter and afterglow, and walk to the crash pad, or the drive-in
  restaurant, or the fishbowl, for a little social life, business or
  food, before getting back to our mirrored bed. No matter what else we
  were occupied with during those first days together, we’d get back to
  bed as soon as we could. We kept saying to each other, “I’ve never felt
  anything like this before.” And then it took a quantum leap into the
  extreme and weird after the amphetmine drought ended.

  One day that first week, while I still had the VW bug, Steve had
  gotten a message to me through Jim Fate and a chain of hippies and
  teeny boppers: he’d made a batch of meth. He needed, first of all,
  testers; if it was good, he’d need distributors. We got into the bug
  with Surfer Roy and zipped a few blocks to Steve’s new digs, a
  converted carriage house. His landlady lived in the old servants’
  quarters upstairs on the income from renting the main house and his
  “garage apartment.” Her yard was full of flowers and herbs. Surfer and
  I barely paused long enough to get Steve’s assurance that he really
  knew how to make speed before we each hit up about a quarter-teaspoon
  of the slightly oily white powder. It worked. Ten feet tall and
  bullet-proof, I sat back and listened to Steve and Hulk negotiating
  terms. Several times they turned to Surfer and me to asked how it was,
  how we were. Surfer and I looked at each other, giggled, and assured
  Steve and Hulk that the batch had been a success. We took three ounces
  with us when we floated out of there.

  I’ve skipped over an important event that might have struck a note for some attentive readers. I hit up, shot, fired, ran, injected
  meth. This wasn’t the first time. That first time had been on about the
  fourth or fifth occasion that I was in a roomful of speed freaks when
  they got off. Contact highs were marvelous, indeed. But after the rush,
  the rest of them had some evident something that wasn’t there for me. I wanted it.

  I knew it had much in common with the amphetamine highs of ingested
  benzedrine and dexedrine and thus would buoy up my mood, put spring in
  my step, dry up my hay fever and put the asthma into remission. These
  were the therapeutic effects of amphetamine that had attacted me when I
  read the PDR on quiet nights on duty in the hospital. Steve had advised
  me to avoid the needles, and when he shot up it was with evident
  distaste for the needle. He resisted but didn’t actually balk. My next
  payoff for phone sitting had been a little bag of crystal meth and a
  set of works They were delivered along with a lecture on sterile
  procedures and hygeine.

  This had been while I still lived with VW, but he hadn’t taken up
  the needle by the time I left. He did later, though, within a month or
  two.

  One facet of injected meth as opposed to ingested speed that hit me
  very hard was the brevity of the high. Another was the severity of the
  fall, the comedown. I recall a glorious summer morning beside the
  Willamette River amid birdsong and flowers in a mood as black as the
  Infinite Void. VW was just coming off the weekend’s acid. He was a bit
  awkward about it, that not being his usual style. I was abject about
  it, convinced that even if there was a tomorrow, it wasn’t worth
  staying around to see. He talked me out of suicide. There at the end of
  our marriage, VW saved my life.

  • 2:11 pm
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