I came down
hard off the speed after the first few hours in the drunk tank, where
they stuck me because, they said, they couldn’t be sure if what I had
was contagious. The pair of single isolation cells with a narrow steel
corridor outside their barred doors had a nice echoing reverb effect on
my voice. I had an old sad song in my head, So Lonesome I Could Cry. I
sang it. A few weeks later, when the doc cleared me to move to the dorm
with everyone else, I heard about that. Mournful is the nicest of the
words I heard about my off-key late night singing in the drunk tank
next door. I asked them why, since they could hear me and presumably I
could have heard them, no one had told me to shut up. They said I
sounded so damn sad they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, and besides,
for all they knew I was drunk, and yelling at me would only have made
me start yelling back. I knew what they meant. There had been a few
drunks coming and going in the other isolation cell next to mine. One
of them had been Char.

Flashback: before the arrest, and I think after the beating… yes,
probably a gesture, a “gift” from Hulk to cheer me up, to make amends.
Hulk picked up Char, a cute bisexual hooker about our age, blonde, with
lots of street smarts and a filthy mouth, probably from associating
with GIs or bikers, or maybe she had brothers. He brought her home to
me, for a threesome. He paid her in speed, I suppose. She loved the
bubble bath and we all three were giggly and very high by the time we
got to the bed. We did each other while Hulk watched, then we all three
did each other some more. I will never forget my first same-sex
experience, but Char didn’t even remember me at all when we met in jail
a few weeks later. As soon as she was conscious the next morning she
was out of there. Maybe she flashed on me later, eh? Char’s another one
I’d stalk if I had a clue.

At my arrest, I weighed 95 pounds, the first time I’d been under 100
pounds since about age 11. I’d been at about 135 or so when I started
shooting speed, and that’s slender for me. The medical profession has a
cute phrase for some of the easiest diagnostic signs for hepatitis:
“coffee and clay.” Urine comes out looking like strong black coffee,
and feces come out gray like clay. Symptoms include nausea, sleep
disturbances (either can’t sleep or can’t stay awake), pain, loss of
appetite, weakness, incoordination and blurred vision. I had all of
that, along with the depression from coming down off speed and the fear
that surrounded being in jail with no foreseeable way out. And I
couldn’t stomach the smell of my own sick body. No showers in the
isolation area, only cold water in the cell. Steel rack with thin foam
pad covered in Naugahyde (jillions of naugas died to furnish that jail)
and one gray wool army blanket was it, no sheet, towel, just cold water
standup rinse and drip dry. If there are any old jailbirds among my
readers, they’re saying, “yeah, so what?” None of that is unusually
harsh, and many jails are harsher.

The walls were covered with graffiti. Yeah, a few names and brief
phrases like graffiti you see on the streets, but mostly long
autobiographical essays, how inmate X was in there because of asshole Y
and vowed vengeance forever; or how inmates m and n, she up in this
hole while her man was downstairs in the big jail and she vowed her
eternal fidelity, then went on to say to hell with all of that the
cowardly bastard had ratted her out. You have a lot of time to write on
the wall in jail. I wish I could recall what I wrote. That’s something
for the next time I go down the rabbit hole.

I am so very glad that I’m done with that speed freak segment.
Retrieving those state bound memories has been hell on my system. I’m
ready for a break. Jail gave me the break I needed to get off speed.
That and some social things occurring after I got out that time. More
on that later… remind me if I space it.

A couple of weeks into my stay there, I realized I knew what was for
breakfast the next day. Breakfast always rotated the same way: pancakes
then oatmeal then a fried egg then cold cereal and back to pancakes
again. It took a lot less time than that for me to figure out that
ground venison patty (the jail got all roadkill and anything
confiscated from poachers) and green beans for dinner would mean
venison and green bean soup next day for lunch. I suppose just to keep
us on our toes, we never knew whether it would be bologna or peanut
butter on the white bread at lunch, nor could we predict the flavor of
Kool-Aid from day to day. One constant was coffee in the morning. The
other was the grape jelly, the only flavor ever on the PBJ.

Hulk called a lawyer and paid him all the money we had. The lawyer got
our cases severed so he’d only be representing Hulk. I got a public
defender. That move made sense, since Hulk had more of a record than I
did and was on probation already. He ended up having to serve the time
required on that probation, which I think was seven months, but the
lawyer got him off clean on the new possession of marijuana charge.

My public defender told me my best course would be to plead guilty. He
said he could get me a deal so that I’d get probation and no time
beyond what I had already served by then, about a month and a half. I
went to court, pled guilty to possession of about ten grams of
marijuana (a felony at that time in Oregon) and was released on my own
recognizance pending a presentence investigation.

I had spent Halloween and Thanksgiving in jail, got out in early
December, I think. I didn’t find many people I knew, at first; found
none of my close associates or old friends. I hadn’t seen Mardy since a
single visit she paid to our alley hideaway to say goodbye as she and
Loose Lew were headed out of town. She had been pissed off at him,
bitching that his goddam fucking boozing and doping and living in
Disneyland had lost her three girls already and she was fed up. The
rant makes a lot more sense now that I know what she didn’t tell me at
the time. She was pregnant.

One of my first missions when I got out of jail was to walk across town
to our last home and see if anything I owned was still there. A desk of
mine was out on the front porch with a few papers and pictures in it.
That was all. The house was locked and empty.

Later on, I ran into one of the Crow Farmers, Fred. He had my I Ching!
I was delighted. I had used the ancient Chinese oracle since being
introduced to it by Carol and had kept marginal notes of every oracle
reading I had done for self or others. It had been the first oracle I’d
consciously used. I had flipped coins (numismancy?) before, and my
mother had taught me bibliomancy (but not the word for it): ask a
question and open the Bible, dictionary, etc., to read the answer. I
Ching ratcheted the oracle thing up a notch.

Fred said that the night we were busted, our housemates had cleared
their things out. Jeanne had gone back to her parents. Tree, who was
from the Midwest somewhere, had gone home. I hope they got free from
speed. I’d be using the web to search for them if I knew their full
names and had any clues. That goes for a lot of people, some of whom I
am sure would be glad if they knew they don’t have me around to remind
them of old times because I simply can’t remember their names.

Fred had picked up the I ching the next day or soon after we were
arrested. Many of our friends had scavenged things from our place. I
heard that Jeanne took the stoneware I’d bought in Japan. I hope so.
Surfer’s sister had come with a pickup truck and got my LP collection
and the cedar under-bed storage chest I’d been using as a coffee table
with floor pillows in my last four homes. The autographs, the Hells
Angels, Merry Pranksters and Bay Area musicians’ names carved in that
old cedar chest are probably worth a fortune. As soon as I found out
where the stuff was, I got Surfer to take me to his sister’s house. I
took an armload of my favorite LPs and she gave me what I considered
fair considering it was all she had at the time, for the chest and the
rest of the records. Surfer also gave me a little box of other things
he’d just grabbed for safekeeping, not all of which had belonged to me,
but most of which had significant value. Surfer had an eye for quality.
But I wouldn’t find Surfer for weeks yet, when I first got out of jail.

The first friend I found was Glenn Vaughn. He had quit doing speed,
helped along by seeing what it had done to me. He was getting into
herbal medicine, and he got me started studying that. He was sharing a
house with some jock-type college students for whom he scored drugs.
These boys liked injecting LSD. Swallowing it is fine, folks. Nobody
really needs to stick it in a vein. The onset is faster. Other than
that, I don’t think there’s a difference. I shot some acid with the
jocks and did something shamanic. Does “shamanic” there make it sound
special? **DEEP heavy sigh!** (little injoke there–the shamans among
you are snickering… and if you’re not, you will be. Read on.)

Decades later I learned that in many shamanic cultures an initiate into
shamanism has to go through a death and rebirth experience. Some
ritualize it and others dramatize it while still other cultures do it
with entheogenic and psychedelic drugs. Later, I would learn that.

That first night I was out of jail, after these boys shot me up with
LSD and then told me to make myself at home when they left, I didn’t
know anything at all about shamanism. Well, maybe I would have
correctly associated rattles and drums with a medicine-man shaman, but
I had no idea what the drums and rattles did. Glenn went to sleep, but
the acid wouldn’t let me sleep. The bright cheery kitchen was bumming
me out, and the living room with foosball table and dumbells was no
better. I wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. As I
stood there I saw myself age. I died, fell to the floor and rotted
away. My bones turned to dust and blew away on the wind. Then a
whirlwind turned up and left a new me behind.

I suppose the new me was a lot more optimistic than the old one. The
old me would have known that it wouldn’t work, but the new me was
convinced that I needed to be with Hulk so badly that the jailers would
just have to let me in. I walked across town and knocked at the door of
the Lane County Jail. The jailer who opened the little door over the
peephole in the big door said I’d have to come back during visiting
hours. Whew! I mean that whew now. At the time, I was crushed. But
before I yielded to the impulse to throw myself onto the concrete step
and start wailing and banging on the door, I yielded to the one or two
rational brain cells I had left. I walked back across town and sat
there with the barbells until daylight.

Incarceration, and then getting out of jail, is almost always, for
anyone, a transformative experience. When I was going to jail,
extraordinary numbers of Americans were going to jail. Aw, hell, it’s
still going on, dammit! For most of the people who go in and out of
jail it’s destructive to their careers, families, their whole lives.
Doing things backwards, as usual, I was helped by it, saved, actually,
but kicking and screaming, dragging my heels all the way. You’d have to
be a lot weirder than I am to enjoy going through the jail experience,
and anyone who’s been all the way through it will admit that one of the
hardest parts is getting back into life when you’re back on the streets.

Weekdays were all right. Public libraries are one of my favorite places
to be, always have been. I’ve gone to the library to escape Mama and a
string of step-fathers, and several husbands, and to entertain myself
and my daughter when we were flat broke. That winter in Eugene, I
stayed there to escape the cold wind on the streets. The reading I did
then was some of the most important, seminal, empowering work of my
career. I read physics and math, did comparative study of various
translations of the Christian Bible, devoured Hayakawa and Chomsky then
exhausted the library’s collection on semantics and semiotic. I started
asking questions of the reference librarian and got introduced to some
early collections of myths from various cultures that were kept in the
stacks, out of general circulation because of age, fragility or value.
And I fell in love with the works of J. Frank Dobie, myth and folklore
of the American Southwest. It all felt so familiar, so meaningful, so
true. Now I know why.

Where was I? ADD… I’ve mentioned before that our entire family has
ADD. ADHD, but in our case, all three of us have hyperactivity of the
mind. Our bodies are mousepotatoes. No, ADD is not where I was, it was
just my feeble stab at justifiying the digression. Now I recall, I was
relating some of the difficulties in getting back on the streets after
jail.

The library was all the luxury in my life that winter. When it closed,
I headed for the coffeehouse. I panhandled on the streets: “Spare
change?” With some tea and a scone and if the streets had been
generous, a little cup of yogurt, I’d start asking around for a place
to crash for the night. “One night stand” would be a polite but
hypocritical way to characterize some of the crash places I found. I
don’t think any of the guys had any illusions of ongoing relationships
and I know I didn’t expect anything of that sort. What I most wanted
was a warm place to sleep. Orgasms were frosting on the cake, and a
shower in the morning was whipped cream and a cherry on top. If one had
laundry facilities, even better. Sometimes it was even safe sex,
something fairly unusual at the time. I learned a lot after the library
closed at night, too.

I wasn’t getting anywhere with my job search. One usually needs an
address, phone number, transportation, clothing, and such, to find a
job and I more or less needed a job to get any of those things. When
the library closed, I joined the afterwork crowd at the coffeehouse to
try and find a new angle to play.

That’s how I got steered to the head shop down the street where Rhys
Court sold bongs, posters and underground comix. And on the glass
counter over a display of glass hash pipes, he laid out the Rider-Waite
Tarot in a Celtic Cross spread and told me what was going on in my
life. I’m sure he was anticipating the future card as much as I was by
the time he got to it. He told me I needed all the wits and wisdom at
my disposal and some help from my family to get through this crisis. My
crisis he had been describing to me without knowing anything about me.
Wow.

The man who owned the new taco joint was new to Eugene. He was retired
from a career in TV in Vegas, I think. His name is another one I’d love
to be able to drop, if I could only remember…. The retirement cum
taco business wasn’t doing too well. He was trying to run a mom and pop
business by himself. He needed help. I convinced him that he could
afford to feed me twice a day for my help during his lunch and dinner
rushes.

Then, he liked the arrangement so well that he gave the same deal to
another young woman I’d met in the coffeehouse, homeless after
hospitalization and detox. My mom had sent me the crucial twelve US
dollars, all she could spare, to get a room for a whole week, and tips
from the taco joint extended it. It was a sleeping room and I used an
iron upended on two coffee mugs to heat a pan of water for tea or
Lipton’s soup and the rest of the time I ate tacos and burritos and
learned to cook them fast and tasty.

Then what’s-her-name… think it has a B in it… Barbara… I
dunno…. so frustrating. Oh, well, we helped our boss’s business take
off, we brought in business and he decided to help that process along
by getting us in there in lingerie in the evening, and it did extend
the day’s business and the bottom line in his till and our tips. Then
we found a little house behind a bigger house a few blocks away and
became roomies. I went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with her. A lot
of what I know about spilling my guts I learned from that NA therapy
group. I do wish I could remember her name, and what’s with this
chaotically spotty memory stuff anyhow?

Enough of what I can’t remember. Next time I’ll get into what I do recall.

 

I was looking freaky with the frizz, a huge red afro from hell.
There was intense pain if I tried to brush it, and lots of it fell out.
I let it frizz, wild and natural. Jeanne and some other people
including Glenn and Surfer, didn’t like my dark biker outfits, so they
gave me what they wanted to see me in: bright flowing caftans,
hip-hugger pants and crop-tops, broad straw hats and tall moccasin
boots. Anything just too groovy for words but a touch too over the top
for comfort on one’s own body, give it to Kathy, to Coyote’s
crazy-as-a-coot sister, and watch her flaunt it to maximum effect.

Flashback time again:

When I fled from VW to the Hulk’s house, I went without shoes. It
was hot midsummer and next day the sidewalks were like a big griddle.
Hulk bought me a pair of sandals. We were on Willamette Street, and I
did a few little barefoot hops on the hot pavement, and Hulk led me
around a corner and through a shady alley to the Salvation Army and
bought me a 50-cent pair of brown leather sandals. Nothing ever felt
better on my feet except Mother Earth and Father Sky. I was
pathetically grateful, and when I saw it reflected in his eyes, I saw
how far down I’d been with the bikers and how much farther up I’d
already come since my liberation.

I was so free, so looose… let that Freudian typo stand. Hulk,
jaded old doc Feelgood who had perfected his craft at both dealing
and injecting amphetamines in Phoenix on a mission for the West Coast
speed syndicate, the same bunch of guys who had been selling big flat
white-cross bennies in quantity to the Bay Area Hells Angels, this
weird Incredible Hulk said that seeing the world through my eyes gave
him a fresh perspective on it. The feeling was mutual, because his
presence and actions and the people and events and methamphetamine
hydrochloride he brought into my life and my bloodstream, not to
mention all the endogenous endorphins and dopamine and such, engendered
by our incessant sexual indulgence, had given me a grand new view of
the universe. Epiphanies coming in bunches, peak after peak after peak,
processing high-level data at ‘way above the speed limit. White light,
white heat.

Late nights, when most people slept, Hulk and I liked to walk. Then
we decided to ride bikes. We found a couple of bikes leaning against
the sides of houses or lying in a driveway. We would ride one until we
spotted another unsecured bike and then swap. We randomly left little
kids’ single-speed bikes where we picked up new ten-speeds and vice
versa. For about four or five nights, we did that, until it became
harder and harder to find unattended bikes left out, except for the
worst of the worst that we’d dropped on some disgruntled bicyclist as
we took his ten-speed. The good bikes grew locks and chains or
disappeared behind closed doors. Thus robbed of our fun, we found a new
game to play, a novelty called sleep.

When we slept together on speed, we shared dreams. Our experience
with the nitrous oxide and acid combo at Page Browning’s wedding had
been similar, only the shared part there was waking thoughts and
sensations, not dreams, and it had been a circle of people sharing them
all, not just the two of us. But neither were the shared dreams, it
seemed, just between the two of us. One morning Jeanne was telling the
household about her dream and Hulk and I exchanged wowed expressions
because we had just been comparing notes privately about a dream with
many of the same elements. Speed accelerated my psychic development,
the shamanic unfoldment and metaphysical initiation triggered by my
studies and the psychedelics. I was illuminated, which is the origin of
“Catherine”, the root source of my name. Bright, hot white light,
consuming me.

One day one of our roomies brought home someone I could have sworn I
knew from somewhere. When I said to Zodiac, a roadie for the Grateful
Dead, that I thought I knew him, he looked closer at me and then said,
“Yes, I knew you in a past life.” I didn’t know about that.
Reincarnation was something I’d heard of but didn’t believe in, but I
liked Zodiac a lot. He drove an old sports car with no top and rust
where the paint used to be. It was some kinda classic car, British I
think. [Memory blip:  Jaguar!  I'm pretty sure Zodiac's car
was an old Jaguar.]  Guys drooled over it. The car was okay, and
Zodiac was a lot of fun. He had some functioning brain cells, he read
books, and he liked to talk about issues, all of which I found
refreshing.

He liked to shoot speed, but he had the same vein problems I did. He
didn’t need much persuasion to join me in a hot bath after several of
us assured him that the technique worked, made veins come closer to the
surface and relax, become larger, easier targets. He kept glancing at
the Bob Weir poster, said it was a little creepy, but after we both got
the speed into our veins, and when the party that was going on in the
front of the house started crowding into the bathroom with us, I think
he forgot about the poster. That party stands out in memory as the last
of the relatively carefree times for us, before things started falling
apart.

That summer, a bunch of our friends who lived on a commune outside
town, a place called Crow Farm, got busted spectacularly. If I recall
the numbers correctly, three helicopters and five carloads of cops
arrested eight adults, took five kids as wards of the court, rounded up
several dogs for the pound and impounded a bunch of other livestock.
This was talked about a lot, and there was a general atmosphere of
paranoia.

Steve had always been cautious verging on paranoiac. He was pretty
freaky over his brother’s death at the time he moved into his garage
apartment with the landlady upstairs and started cooking meth in his
kitchen. The first batch was a success, but then he got sloppy and
produced a batch that came out brown, and another that was blue-violet
in color. Surfer tested them, and got sick. I was lucky enough to have
been otherwise occupied, or I’d have been the one who got sick.

Then we didn’t see Steve for a while. He took off expecting to have
the police after him following a little mishap in his kitchen. The
chemical reactions in meth manufacture produce heat. The retort (in
Steve’s kitchen it was an old thick green glass 5-gallon bottle from an
office water cooler) has to be kept in a cooling bath and the
temperature of the reaction needs to stay within a certain range: too
low and the product isn’t right; too high, it runs out of control and
blows up.

The two bad batches that made Surfer sick had probably been a result
of Steve being overcautious about letting the reaction heat up. His
next attempt, he must have overcompensated. It got too hot. In an
heroic act to save his landlady upstairs and her property, he had
grabbed up the big hot bottle using curtains as potholders, hurried to
the door with it and dumped the chemicals into the flowerbed beside his
stoop.

When we saw him again, Steve said he had been certain that the smell
alone would get him busted, so he just stuck the more incriminating
items out of sight of the windows, locked up the place and took off.
After some time, he came back. The only remaining evidence of his
chemical spill was a sunflower in that flowerbed by the porch. His
landlady called it to his attention when it grew so tall it was looking
in her second-floor window. By the time we saw it, it had grown beyond
her window, and was heading for the roof. It topped out somewhere over
15 feet tall (around 5 meters). The other sunflowers in the yard
stopped somewhere between two and three meters, around 6-8 feet.

While Steve was gone and Eugene was in another speed drought, it
seemed that everyone in town was coming around either looking for speed
from us, or if they knew about the situation, trying to get us to chip
in with them and make a trip to Portland to cop. At one point, the
Free Souls (the outlaw bike club that had been Black Ravens in
Vallejo)  must have gone to the Bay Area for a supply, because VW
pulled up to our curb one day, with peace offerings of meth, saying he
understood how rough it was in a drought. I was so glad he wasn’t still
pissed off at me. I do hate being hated.

Eventually, we decided we’d have to make a run to Portland for
speed. The first step was arranging transportation. It ended up being
Glenn Vaughn’s old canary yellow Chevy. He drove us around town, seeing
all our old customers, promising speed tomorrow for cash in advance
today. A lot of people wanted the speed but very few wanted to risk
fronting us money. We spent an entire day getting together about $360
in small bills. We had contacted the dealer in Portland and set up a
meet for sometime in the wee small hours.

It was someone we’d never dealt with before and the person who was
our go-between had said he was a tough guy, carried a gun, and had been
known to burn people he didn’t like: take their money and not deliver
any speed. It was important to Hulk to make a good impression. He had a
gun, but we’d all prefer to just dazzle and befriend the man. For
starters, we wore our best clothes. For Hulk, that always meant the
black Stetson with the silver and turquoise concho hatband. I was
resplendent in a turquoise and green paisley caftan and big hat. Just
before we left town, Hulk pulled the wads of small bills out and said
we couldn’t go to some big time dealer with that mess. We needed to
turn it into some hundred-dollar bills, to show some class.

Okay, sounded like a good idea. But where could we get hundred
dollar bills in the middle of the night? A bored waitress in an
all-night cafe seemed happy enough to exchange the only hundred in her
till for a wad of fives and tens, and then the troop was off in search
of more big bills. We finally walked into the Western Union Telegraph
office, Hulk and I and three of our friends. The clerk showed a flash
of pure panic when Hulk boomed in his deep voice, “Do you have any
hundred-dollar bills?” Then we assured him that we didn’t want to rob
him, and showed him our crumpled wads of cash. He provided two more
engraved portraits of Ben Franklin, and we were off to Portland.

It was a grueling all-night cluster-fuck. The man wasn’t where he
said he’d be. When we found him, he didn’t have enough for our needs
and we had to wait for someone to run down some more. Then, it turned
out to have been walked on, adulterated. It got us off, but it took
more of it to get there and it left nasty metallic tastes in our
throats, made our sweat smell really weird, and I got sick on it, got
nephritis, kidney inflammation.

That lot of meth didn’t last long, was actually all sold before we
even got back to Eugene with it. The lousy quality left us with
disgruntled customers and no alternative suppliers. We started sleeping
a lot and nobody was very happy. Hulk was in the back room asleep one
day when his old girlfriend, the one whose betrayal led to his earning
that name, knocked on the door. She said she knew about our being out
of speed, and had some heroin that she wondered if we would want. It
didn’t sound interesting to me, and I didn’t like her, so I didn’t even
invite her in. I just said no and good-bye, and shut the door. When
Hulk woke up, I told him and he beat me up. It was the only time that
he ever was violent with me. And it was one of the worst beatings of my
life. I lost teeth from it, one by one over the years, from “trauma
cracks”, as my dentist called them. Hulk was contrite and apologetic. I
understood, really I did. I had always known he was volatile when he
first woke up. I have since learned that it comes from low blood sugar.

At the time, I thought my heart was broken. A lot of the luster was
off our shiny new relationship, fershure. I simply assumed that this
was to end up being the first of a series of beatings until either he
killed me or I left. As he was punching and kicking me, I was huddled
in a ball in the corner of our mattress in the back bedroom, arms over
my head, screaming and sobbing. When he wound down and cooled off, he
left the room for a few moments, then came back with a wet cloth and
cleaned the blood off my face. He held me and we cried together. He
laid me down and tucked me in like a baby.

I stayed in that room until the facial bruises faded and cuts
healed. Neither of us wanted my face to be seen, but our housemates did
see it. The whole story got told and Tree and Glenn were indignant,
shaming Hulk until I came to his defense. I know they all thought I was
nuts. I can’t argue with that judgment, but I knew that Hulk loved me
and I certainly loved and still do love Hulk. Nobody understood that.

But Hulk looked after me. He waited on me, helped me to the bathroom
until I could make it on my own power. He kept me fed and the house
clean. When speed was available, he brought it home to me. Each time,
he would tell me I was poisoning myself with the stuff, but he wouldn’t
keep it from me. He did try, but I begged and he relented.

After I’d gotten too ill to move around freely, with hepatitis and
nephritis in addition to the fibro and whatever general toxic
conditions existed as well as aftereffects of the beating, one time
Surfer came over, mostly to check up on us, on me, solicitous,
affectionate friendly concern. He looked deeply into my eyes and
something clicked, locked on. He hugged me and left and, too weak to
move, I willed myself to go with him. The next time I saw him, I told
him about his walk, the route he had taken, first to the Odyssey Coffeehouse
and then a sweep of the fishbowl before hooking back toward his house.
I told him who he met on Willamette Street, and who he stopped to
stare after as she passed on the U of O campus. I told him how he had
felt as he lay down to sleep and thanked him for the concern that had
been preoccupying his mind for much of his walk home. He acknowledged
the whole thing with a tear in his eye and then exchanged an odd glance
with the Hulk.

Everyone was looking at me and speaking to me in a way that said
clearly they didn’t expect me to survive. More than a few, even some
friends who were bikers, groused and said something should be done with
that rat, VW, because he had knowingly given me hepatitis with a free
hit of speed in a syringe he said was clean, freshly sterilized. It was
at his bury-the-hatchet visit after I’d been gone a couple of months.
Then he had gone and boasted about it. Bury that old hatchet right in
silly old Ms. Coyote’s thick skull, yes indeed.

My saviors came in the unlikely guise of a young pair of newlywed
speed freaks. These kids from Newport or Tillamook or somewhere on the
coast, had gotten married after high school graduation and had come to
Eugene to be hippies. Speed got them and they had been dealing with our
gaggle of runaways and older delinquents for a while. When they left
our house after copping a baggie of crank, they got busted. For a deal
on their prosecution, they gave up their contacts. My direct salvation
came in the form of a dozen or so cops, in uniform and in plain
clothes, males and females and a couple of dogs. No knock. Just heavy
steps on the wooden porch, a shout of, “police!”, and the door kicked
open.

Tree was in the bedroom when they hit the door. Thinking fast, he
dropped the household stash out the back window, a cigar box with
everyone’s ‘fits, most of them eye-dropper glass with the rubber bulb
from an old-style pacifier, a few insulin syringes, and our communal
supply of crank. That window, due to the hill the house was on, opened
onto a vertical drop down a bluff equivalent to a two-story house. A
dumpster in the lot of a gas station was where the box landed, and the
kids were able to retrieve it later. The only other dope in the house
was a skinny partial lid of weed that Jeanne had just brought in and
Hulk had stashed temporarily in an old empty purse of mine under a table in
the front room. That was what they busted us for. Hulk went in because
he was already on probation and because the house was rented in his
name. I went in because the purse belonged to me. Everyone else walked.

I’ve
been neglecting to inform those of delicate sensibilities that my blogs
are often offensive.  This warning goes for the whole
collection, since it’s the inoffensive ones that are the rare
exceptions.  Now to the latest installment of my memoirs:

Here’s a questionnaire I couldn’t resist when I read the answers Jude gave.

Name:  Kathy Lynn Douglass, Coyote Medicine, Secretary of Space, Susitna Sue and SuSu

Age: 57

Rank: female

SS # : 23 skiddoo, kiddo

DOB: 9-18-1944

Sex: any offers?

No Your Real Sex!!!!! M/F : Asked and answered, M/F.

Work: on Self, art, craft, writing memoirs, writing fiction (New Age
close encounter serial killer thriller), supervising family business,
subsistence, hunting, gathering, sowing and reaping.

Or no work: Play, you mean?  Yes indeed, every day. 

Pet Peeves: Defensiveness pushes all my buttons.  Anyone who
won’t entertain or can’t accept conflict, dissent or criticism without
resorting to diversionary defense mechanisms or angry ad hominem
invective, is pathetic.

Why Xanga: Sarah, sister of my soul was at Xanga.  She had said
she thought I should blog.  When a grandmother came to me in a
dream and said I needed to keep a journal, the penny dropped.

Favorite hiding place: My workroom, once the master bedroom at the
back of this 15′X 55′ trailer my family started out housesitting in
1998, right after Sarah went back to Big Sur.  She lived here
first, and some of her stuff is still back in the room where her bed
was once.  The bed is in by the wood stove in the front room now,
so I can keep the fire going at night.  In the “bedroom” at the
back of the trailer Greyfox’s stock for his stand shares shelf space
with my books, sewing machine, tools, and my houseplants.  That’s
the room where I start seeds in early spring to plant outside after the
snow goes.  I hope this question refers to where I most like to
hide myself.  I don’t tell anyone where I hide the stash, or
what’s in it.

Childhood Accidents: Numerous falls, cut and scrapes.  My
parents took me out to party with a cousin and his friend who were in
the Navy, on VJ night, the party after VJ day (Victory over Japan, end
of WWII, for those for whom it’s history).  I was a babe
in arms.  They got in a wreck and I ended up under
the driver’s seat while my mother ended up on the pavement on her
butt.  No severe injuries.  I was an uncoordinated, curious
risk-taker.  Skate the edge, and over the edge.  First ER
visit:  Tobe, male half of the old couple who rented half our
house after my father died, was swinging me around (age 7) and
dislocated my shoulder.  A few years later my mother and I flipped
and rolled in a 1948 Chevy on a sandy country road in Kansas–crested a
rise in the road, with a switchback just below the crest on the other
side, going too fast.  One of my first boyfriends hugged me too
tight when I was about twelve and separated the cartilage on some of my
ribs.

Quirks: I looked it up:  “a peculiar trait: 
IDIOSYNCRACY”  Hmmm.  I say what I mean and I mean what I
say, most of the time.  If I’m not sure, I look it up.

Where you live: Upper Susitna Valley, Alaska, about equidistant between Talkeetna, Willow and Trapper Creek.

Where were you born? San Jose, California

Is it a bathroom or toilet? : The room is a bathroom, or a washroom
if I’m in Canada; or else it is a john, ladies’ room, powder room or
potty.  The toilet is the porcelain throne, of which there is none
in our outhouse here in the valley.

Is the cup half full or half empty?: The cup is just there to give shape to its contents.  I fill and empty it at Will.

Do you believe in Love at first sight?: Beyond merely believing in it, I practice it.  It’s fun.

Favorite Phrase: I knew you were going to say that.  (Coyote Medicine, the smart-ass psychic)

Favorite comeback: Yeah… right.

Favorite Era? Present, by far… and I speak from LOOONG experience.

Quick wit or slow?: Often my laugh rings out about a half a beat
before the rest of the crowd gets the joke or sees the unintended humor
in something.  But I’m so literal-minded that there are some
things I don’t get at all.  I haven’t mastered metaphor.

Scars: Many cuts and burns on my hands from a lifetime in kitchens
and tinkering with tools and machines.  Healed-over cracks in
skull and arm and thumb.  Burn near the bottom of my bottom from a
motorcycle with a broken fender strut, stab wound from a screwdriver I
drove into my own foot getting into the back seat of an old Ford or
Chevy coupe in a hurry.  Do stretch marks count?  Oh, and
mustn’t forget the stitching and scarring of labial tears from
childbirth.  As PFC Sephiroth, my favorite of my son’s best
friends, says, “That’s nothing, compared to my scarred psyche.”

Are you recognizable in a crowd? Yes, unless I choose not to be noticed.

Fact or fiction / Your xanga Site? Fact, unless clearly labeled as fiction or stated as opinion.

Favorite Memory: no single one, but a series of sunsets and sunrises in Sedona

Worst fear: That I might still have some unacknowledged fear
remaining somewhere under a layer of denial.  Naaaah, not
really.  Even that thought doesn’t scare me.

DO you gossip: What I like best to do with the gossip I hear is to
discuss it with the absent third party who was the topic of the
gossip.  I like to get to the facts, from the source.

song of the moment: Baillamos!

Describe a day  in life of : When I wake, either Doug hasn’t
gone to bed yet, or everyone is asleep, unless it is one of the cats or
Koji dog who wakes me, wanting to go out (or in the case of Pidney cat,
demanding that I get up and shut the door she pushed open to get
in).  I click on the TV, run to the outhouse then come in and
check the fire and stoke it except in June, July and August, take my
pills (yecch), and get coffee while local news or Today tells me what’s
up out there.  Second cup of coffee and something solid to eat and
if Doug isn’t using it, I warm up the computer and read my comments on
Xanga while I eat breakfast.  By then I’m awake enough to go care
for the living things for which I am responsible, starting with the
plants, the ones least able to assert their needs.  On typical
days, after chores I’m exhausted and retire to my bed where I sit in a
half lotus under a laptop and write.  Atypical days can take me
miles away on various missions or replace the day of writing with video
fests when Greyfox is home craving entertainment, or with days of play
at the PS2 when I am blocked or we have a new game.  I read books,
too, sometimes all day for days and days when I’m researching
something, and always for at least half an hour at bedtime. 
Computer time gets slipped in wherever it fits around the schedule of
the two males who share my home.  What I do here includes
research, maintaining 3 little websites and building a fourth, poppit,
animal ark, news, genealogy and stalking old friends and lost family,
and xanga.

Favorite people:  I love everyone I know, and more deeply the
better I know them.  The one closest to my heart, though, is my
youngest child, Doug, the best traveling companion I’ve ever had, the
only one who has ever liked to travel the back roads with me and stop
at every whim.  His close childhood friends Lindy and Randy (AKA
Sephiroth) are also among my favorite living humans.  I have a big
soul family and they know who they are and I’m not even sure I know who
all of them are, but they are all my favorites. If we’re including
favorite dead people, they’re too numerous to name.

Quote of the moment: “A risk a day helps keep your fears away.”
(Sarah passed this along to me, and I forgot who she said said it.)

Finish the sentences

I was once: smaller

now I’m: extraordinary

I lost my: fears and most of my inhibitions.

I am attracted to: sweet gooey things and high places.

Time is:  Real, but not what you think it is.

Xanga is: getting more interesting.

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.

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….

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]

Cheshired commented on the sadistic nature of the requirement that waitresses wear heels to work.  At that restaurant, the rule was “pumps” with no heel height specified.  The ones I chose, with those funny little one-inch heels, were uncomfortable enough.

Three-inch, spike-heeled pumps were dangerous.  Just a year or two after I worked there, the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed.  OSHA, I would suppose, has done away with such requirements.  If any (U.S.) employer now makes such a rule, he should be reported to OSHA.

For any of you who is addicted to my stories:  I’m on hiatus for a day or two.  With Greyfox off work on account of rain, and three videos to view today, it gives me the excuse I was looking for.  Actually, I’m kinda stuck.  The next installment involves two incidents that may or may not have happened on the same day.  I’ve been pretty busy with house and garden chores, but my mind has been drifting back to that time, trying to sort out chronology and details.

Maybe it’s time for another of those parenthetical analyses of my state of mind.  In fact, this is probably an appropriate spot to insert one, since my state of mind shifted so radically after my first few psychedelic experiences and a number of intellectual discoveries that were roughly concurrent with them.  I guess that’s what I’ll be doing with ol’ Schpeedy Trackbawl (my antique laptop) tonight while Doug is in Neverwinter land.

Study links past abuse and gene to violent acts.

Apparently, people with healthy levels of a certain enzyme linked to a gene on the X chromosome, can experience violence without becoming violent in turn, while it is those with low levels of the enzyme who later commit violent acts.  There is more info, HERE.

And speaking of violence, Greyfox has been at this keyboard again.  ArmsMerchant’s latest blog is about crime and punishment in the good ol’ USA.

Episode #8–the biker years

A few days ago, I wrote about my worst day with the bikers. Now I’ve come to the best day. Best weekend, really. Rhododendron Festival, Florence, Oregon, sometime in Spring, 1969. I was out of work, recuperating from about a three-week illness that lost me my latest job. I had taken a job at Dairy Queen near home after I recovered from the workplace accident that got me out of the Alpine Village Inn. The fancy Bavarian restaurant–that job deserves a little digression.

Worst waitress job–maybe the worst job I ever had, it paid more in hourly wages, and got me more tips than any I’d had before that. It was heavy china plates, tray service, white tablecloths, and not just a dessert cart to wheel around, but a “hot cart” with braised red cabbage, sauerkraut, beans, soup and vegies. We wore dirndl skirts with three crinoline petticoats and if two of us passed between tables, both skirts went up, of course. One wrong move and you could sweep a wine glass off a table with the skirt. That’s why we wore them, I guess: entertainment for the guests.

We also had to work in black pumps. Mine had little Italian heels. Some of my co-workers had spikes; they also had a few falls. The trays could weigh around forty to fifty pounds or more, and we bussed our own tables…with the service trays. I’ve observed customers laughing at a waitress in spike heels on that thick carpet as she crouched to get her shoulder under a tray on a stand, then struggled erect under stacks of dirty dishes and teetered to the kitchen with them.

I dealt with the weight-lifting and the traffic problems, never took a spill or spilled cabbage in anyone’s lap as another waitress did. My problem was a dishwasher who kept flirting with me. He’d try to make conversation over my need for more glasses in the dining room or a hot service plate. He was over-helpful, and that was what did it. I needed a plate and was reaching up for the last plate on the high top shelf of the divider between kitchen and dishwashing area, and he decided to help by pushing a fresh stack of plates over from the other side, knocking the lone remaining plate off my side. It landed edge-on on top of my big toe, the right one. It ruptured the tendon. The toe had to be taped up and then bound up with a bandage that wrapped around my ankle to hold the toe pointing at the sky. I couldn’t wear shoes, wasn’t supposed to walk for a while.

They would have let me come back after the doctor released me, but I thought up a few good rationales and took the Dairy Queen job within walking distance of home. Usually I’d only have to walk one way because VW would be there to either take me or pick me up, depending on my shift. I’d been there a few months when I got some virus or something and was flat in bed for weeks. Carol looked after me. To amuse me, she brought me a little yellow paperback book: Write your own Horoscope. Starting out skeptical, I calculated a few natal charts for myself and people I knew, and found valid insights.   It started something big that has been helpful to me ever since, mostly in relationships. 1969 was a big time, astrologically, too. There was a major planetary alignment–and a big dip in the Timewave, as well. That’s another thing I’ve been wanting to blog about, but this one is supposed to be about rhodendrons and clowns.

Since I wasn’t working and was free to help Steve out, I had been sitting at his place for two days and three nights. He came back with a load of crank and was met by three of his distributors. I had not been around needle freaks when they shot up. I’d been around them, yes, but don’t recall, before then, ever having watched them tie off, bring up a vein, stick in the needle, watch for the “flag” of blood that indicated they’d penetrated a vein, then squeeze the bulb or push the plunger, and get the rush.

Their rushes took my breath away. “Contact high” is what they told me it was when I mentioned my empathic response. One of them even, half-jokingly, bitched that I’d “stolen” his high. His rush was too fleeting for him, I guess. Nobody else minded sharing the buzz.

Steve didn’t have any dexedrine or benzedrine for me that time. He did have some mescaline, he said. He gave me eight big #OO capsules of a white powder, and warned me to take no more than two at a time. On the morning we left for Florence, I took two, washed down with a sip of wine on the highway. By the time we made a gas stop, I was asking, “where are we and what’s going on?” Leaving the gas station, VW did one of those spark-showering wheelies, which helped bring me back to reality. By the time we got to Florence, the rush had passed and I was coherent and radiantly, gloriously psychedelicized. It was such fun that I passed the other half dozen caps around to the other women and had company.

We set up our camp in the shelters that had been thrown together from driftwood along the beach, and got a campfire going and had hot dogs. Then a few of us rode back into town to a bar to bring back some beer. We parked on barstools for a while and talked to some citizens at the bar. They were members of the Astoria Clowns, a group from a fraternal organization, Shriners, I think. They were in street clothes, but told us to be sure to look for them in costume in the parade the next day. We talked about bikes, because some of them rode motor scooters and bicycles, even a pennyfarthing and a unicycle. One friendly clown offered me a ride on the back of his motor scooter. He was kinda cute and VW was in a good mood, so after getting my ol’man’s permission, I said I’d take a ride on his bike with him.

I got up before the rest of the pack the next day, got the fire hot and started coffee. Then I brushed my hair. It was thick and long and always tangled. I’d usually start every day with a thorough brushing, standing bent at the waist, brushing it down over my head. Standing next to the firepit, butt in the air, blood running to my head, with enhanced brain chemistry, I was enjoying the mingled smells of coffee, woodsmoke, and the Pacific Ocean.

I took my time, gave it a full hundred strokes like Mama taught me. When I straightened up and shook the hair back out of my face, about a half dozen people were staring at me. It felt a little spooky, but then both of the girls in the group went, “…ooooh, wow, love your hair!” And a couple of guys swallowed hard and turned away and tugged at their pants. I was still high and already happy, and the approval and attention made me glow.

We decided to watch the parade from the sidewalk in front of the bar. The day started with a little chill among the stone and concrete buildings, and I had on a black leather jacket, black jeans laced with a leather bootlace, and a black hat. As the contingent of clowns passed I spotted the bike belonging to the clown who had offered to give me a ride. It was the only vehicle in the pack with an extra seat. That had been the subject of some teasing the night before. He swung over to the curb, I got on behind, and we waved goodbye as we turned the corner and rode out of the parade, onto the coast highway, in heavy weekend traffic with which his scooter couldn’t keep up.

Behind us, I heard a few horns, probably as cars coming up on us from behind braked and startled the drivers behind them. As people passed us, they grinned and waved. Several bunches of little kids went by with their faces flattened against the glass. It was about three miles, in choking exhaust, but other than that it was one of the wildest three miles of my life, to his motel, where he changed into street clothes and removed his makeup.

As he was taking me out to the beach to join my friends, his engine blew, and we were standing there talking about our options, when a couple of bikers went by and saw us. One of them took me back to our camp on the beach and the other one helped the clown get his bike back to his group’s trailer for the trip home to Astoria.

We all stayed around our fire on the beach and watched the sunset and then hit the road home. For a few miles of cool dusk, running through the woods, I ran the day’s highlights in my mind and made a mental note to remember the day. Then I fell asleep for the rest of the ride home.

It has proven to be quite a memorable day. I have it in color and stereo, with smells and emotions and that mental clarity peculiar to mescaline. Mescalito es mi amigo.