by Howie Gordon
It was a mismatch that would last a stormy six months.
Chapter Thirty-Three
In the summer of 1971, Berkeley seemed to be filled with beautiful, angry women who had a tomahawk poised for anything moving with a penis. Women’s liberation had come into vogue and Berkeley was perhaps its West Coast Mecca.
The Dragon’s Eye Commune I was moving into had about eleven women and only three or four men. All of the women were into women’s liberation and all of the men were into coping.
Personally speaking, I welcomed the discussion. I had a matching chord for angry women. I was an angry man. I wasn’t any more comfortable with society’s sex roles than they were. I refused to play the oppressor. If they’d had fathers who had given them some grief, I’d had a mother who provided me with more than a few things to think about. Short of physical abuse or actual sexual misconduct, I felt as much a victim as they did.
It should be said that the feminism of the era did not necessarily equate to being a lesbian. All kinds of different females were bonding together in support of each other to help find new roles and definitions of womanhood.
Unfortunately, there was no comparable movement for the men. It seemed like the only men’s groups being organized in town were all about being gay. It was too big a leap for the average heterosexual man. He was pretty much left to fend for himself.
Bottom line was that the women I ended up being interested in were all attracted to the ideas of women’s liberation. I wanted to learn what I had to learn in order to still get laid. For that, the commune in Berkeley turned out to be the perfect place at the perfect time.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I knew Carly was my wife within twenty-four hours of meeting her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Looking back, Melody and I had a great summertime fling. We should have stopped it right there. We never should have tried to play house.
We had our warm, loving moments that could feature red-hot connection, but there were also far too many volatile issues between us that could easily devastate and freeze the entire landscape. It would go from spectacular, steamy sex to a dreary nuclear winter and it would get there fast. Arguing with Melody proved to be an exhausting, brutal experience. She was a fierce warrior.
It didn’t take us long to tire of such a roller coaster. I was soon looking for a way out.
Around Thanksgiving, there was to be a big convention in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Turned out that our commune, along with about five others from around the country, all had been sharing some Federal grant funds to study “the uses of drugs in the counterculture.” The grant period was officially coming to a close and there was to be this big party to celebrate and to help coordinate reporting all the findings.
Lucy, my ex, had herself joined a commune in D.C. They also had a piece of this grant. When I learned that she was going to be there in Santa Fe, I thought that, maybe, just maybe, she and I might try to put things back together.
Carly was a member of the host Santa Fe commune. When our Berkeley delegation arrived, Lucy wasn’t there yet. That night, about twenty-five of us unrolled our sleeping bags on the living and dining room floors. Before lights out, I saw Carly tongue-kissing a very large, naked woman. If someone had told me that Carly was about to become my wife, I would have been skeptical.
In the morning, I grew very nervous and fidgety while awaiting Lucy’s arrival. I had to do something. Everyone was getting ready for the journey to the convention site up in the hills outside of the city. I turned to the first Santa Fe person who crossed my path and asked if I could be of some help. It was Carly. She said, “Sure.”
She was going to the grocery store for more supplies and I was welcome to come along. There was fresh snow on the ground as we stepped outside. You could hear the crunch. We got into her Volkswagen bus. It was blue and white. When we were seated inside with the doors closed, we just happened to look at each other. My single days were over. I wonder if we had buckled our seat belts?
I’m not going to tell you what it was because, even after all these years, I really don’t know what it was. But I am going to try and tell you what it was like.
It was like, as we looked into each other’s eyes, it was like God, you remember Her, it was like God just turned down the lights and pressed the “play” button.
Our story was being told to us. Again. She was my wife. I was her husband. It was idiot simple. We’d been married for at least 4,000 years. We were both alive and on the planet at the same time again.
How exactly did this information get communicated? I don’t know. I just knew.
I looked at her and hallucinated. She was a dog. She was a horse. She was a tree. She was an Eskimo. She was a woman. She was a man. It was intense. It was bizarre, but it was not scary. She was a game show contestant and the secret word was being flashed over her head.
It said, “WIFE! WIFE! WIFE!!” Just so there would be no mistake.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. There were no drugs involved.
It was the most religious thing I’d ever experienced and it had nothing to do with religion. It also had nothing to do with arousal or sex either. Neither of us could look away.
How long did it last? I don’t know. Was she feeling the same things I was? You’d have to ask her.
And then, then the lights just came back on. It was morning. It wasn’t “like” morning, it was actually morning and we were both sitting in the front seats of her Volkswagen bus.
One of us asked, “Does this kind of thing happen to you often?”
And the other answered, “No, does it happen to you?”
“Howie?” she said. “Your name is Howie?”
And that’s what it was like. It was like “the burning bush!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“You are so over the top!” Marty the agent said. “I’m embarrassed for you. I am. I’m embarrassed for you! You want to be taken seriously as a writer, as a person, and then you come out with all this Zippity-doo-dah razza-ma-tazz? This chapter is nuts!”
“You’re telling me! I used to think it was romantic, but now I think it’s insane, a collective delusion that Carly and I must have shared from eating a bad banana or breathing in a toxic fart. I know it sounds crazy! How do you think it makes me feel to tell that story to my own kids? It stops sounding so romantic, y’know? Could be that it sets the bar a little high when it comes time for them to choose their own mates, don’t you think? Like if they don’t get a cosmic light show from God like their Mommy and Daddy had, how are they supposed to know if it’s for real?”
“I didn’t even think of that,” Marty said.
“But y’know what, Marty?”
“What?”
“That’s what happened when I met Carly!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The convention became some kind of blur that went on around us. When Lucy arrived, I didn’t know what to do with her. I didn’t know what to say to her. I knew I had just met my wife.
I don’t think Lucy had come with any thoughts of reconciling with me, but still, it seemed hard for her to see me in this awkward situation. We all did our best.
For the most part, Carly and I avoided the larger group and huddled together in a small, mud hut called The Hobbit Hole. Nestled safely within the ageless beauty of snow and mountain, we courted, we wooed, and we traded life stories. We made love, slowly, like we had found each other, again. Didn’t want to make any mistakes. We called it “the awesome all rightness.”
On the other hand, neither of us was really prepared to have a relationship. She had just broken loose from her first marriage and wanted to taste the wind for a while. She said she wasn’t interested in getting involved. Although she denies it to this day, I remember her saying, “Don’t get hung up on me. I burn through things fast.”
I knew I was breaking up with Melody. I too was looking forward to the freedom of being out of a relationship. I claimed I wanted to fuck around without
all the jealousy wars.
Who was kidding who? God, the Universe, or Random Chance, had just presented us with the most precious gift either of us ever dreamed of receiving, and we were wondering whether we should give it back? Uh-uh. Despite our doubts and fears, that wasn’t gonna happen.
The real question seemed to be who was going to pack up and move into whose house, or if we should just get a new house somewhere else altogether.
By the end of the convention, we didn’t resolve it. We left it as a work in progress. For the moment, I would return to Berkeley as planned. Carly would come visit there soon.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Great Curveball
When we got back to Berkeley, it was the first week in December. The holiday season was upon us when I told Melody that I had just met my mate. I was braced for anything, but she was surprisingly gracious and said that she knew it would happen one day. Said she understood that we were never meant to be mates. It struck up a kindness in her like she was mentoring me. I thought it tender. I thought it sweet. It was as if she were walking the groom down the aisle and giving him away.
‘Twas then that she dished up this big, sweeping curve ball and I swung full at it and missed by a mile.
She said that if Carly understood anything about women’s liberation, she wouldn’t expect Melody and me to break up until after the holidays.
This may take a little explaining. Back in the sixties, during the civil rights struggles and all the racial turmoil, one would frequently encounter this argument between a black and a white person. It would usually go like this: The white person would lay claim to understanding some aspect of something to which the black person would contradict by saying, “Unless your skin is black, you will never understand that.” And it generally served very effectively to shut the white person up.
Point being here is when Melody said, “if Carly understood anything about women’s liberation, she wouldn’t expect Melody and me to break up until after the holidays,” I took it as something about women’s liberation that I just did not understand. Like a secret code, I just took it at face value. Besides, it didn’t really matter whether Carly came to be with me in one week or three. We were gonna have the rest of our lives together, I thought.
So, when I called Carly, I said, “Melody says, ‘Women’s liberation! Don’t come until after the holidays.’” Forgive me, Dear Lord, I thought I was making sense. Carly just said,
“Okay.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Melody and I did not make it to Christmas. We entered a spell where we seemed to fight over everything including where to put the butter dish.
Our relationship ended during one argument that got so intense she plunged her fist through the pane of a glass door. There was a bad gash in her hand. It didn’t slow down her arguing one bit. She continued proving her point, gesticulating wildly, sending blood everywhere. I knew we had to get to an emergency room.
I grabbed her and just held her tightly until she calmed down enough to understand that we had to get her to the hospital.
Soon after, I moved next door to another room of the commune that had just opened up.
Chapter Forty
When I called Carly, they said she went to Mexico with some guy. They didn’t expect her to come back.
“What?”
They said that she went to Mexico with some guy. They didn’t expect her to come back.
Chapter Forty-One
I felt like someone had put a bullet in my head. I went numb. January came and there was still no Carly. I got sick. It looked like the flu, but I knew it was heartbreak. I was sick all of January, all of February, and into March. It was a long time.
There was no word from Carly. Her people in Santa Fe got tired of me calling. It was like, “Get a life, man, she’s not here. Snap out of it, dude, she don’t wanta hear from you!”
There were other women interested in me at the commune in Berkeley, but I had Carly branded on my brain. I went through the motions a few times, but I didn’t know what I was doing with another woman. I would tell them about Carly. These were some bad movies.
I thought about suicide, thought that I could, understand, suicide, if a person had to keep on feeling like this. I just didn’t know how to turn the corner. I had met my life, I had met my wife, and somehow let them slip away. I cried a lot. It was a winter of despair.
I think it was ultimately the Spring that brought me back to life. The heat, the plants, the sun, it’s just what Spring does. I had rejected suicide as an option because I refused to put my parents through that kind of agony. Period. Once that decision got made, it all became a matter of just trying to feel better, one step at a time.
It helped to reduce the drama by thinking of Carly as just another woman. There had already been a few in my life. I’d known rejection. I sought to put it all behind me as just another inglorious episode and move on.
I found myself in bed one night with one of the few women in the commune I hadn’t had sex with yet. We were having one of those wrestling matches. Y’know, she said that she wanted to sleep with me, but she didn’t want to have sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we were wrestling about it. It was late at night. And there was a knock upon my door.
There stood Carly. She was by herself. She came to be with me.
The woman I was wrestling with quietly gathered up her things and left my room. She knew all about Carly. The whole commune did. I had been able to speak of little else for a long time.
I was happy to see her.
I was furious that she had run off for so long without any word.
Carly explained that when I had given her Melody’s message about “women’s liberation” and not coming until January, she thought it was my way of just getting rid of her.
I asked if she was in love with this other guy she had run off to Mexico with. She said that she didn’t know what they had, but that she just had to see me again.
I was grateful.
I told her that I didn’t mind sharing her love as long as there would be time for us to have what was ours.
With that, we began our life together.
Chapter Forty-Two
When I journeyed back to Santa Fe to be with Carly, I met the other guy. I kind of liked him. We weren’t soul mates or anything, but he was all right. It made sense to me. I wouldn’t have expected Carly to be hanging out with some dork.
That first night, the three of us went to bed together. I thought we were going to be a three-way marriage. I knew she was my wife and I was willing to find out who he was gonna be.
By the way, The Gomez Road Show, which was the name of this commune where Carly lived, had a revolutionary approach to bedrooms. Nobody “owned” one. All bedrooms were communal property. At bedtime, you just walked in and staked out your claim with whatever partner or partners you had in mind, and then you worked it out with whoever or whatever was to follow.
Wow! It sure served to stir the pot of the group’s intimate relationships.
We had nothing like that going on in Berkeley. There was even a song that one of the Gomez Road Show guitar players wrote:
“All around the world,
All the boys and girls
Are playin’, they’re playin’.
All around the world,
All the girls and boys,
They’re sayin’, they’re sayin’…
‘Do what you want to do,
Today…
Go ahead…
And play…
With who…
And when…
You want to.’ ”
Chapter Forty-Three
Looking back from these 500 years later, it’s amazing to see what a burning issue we made back then of monogamy versus what we saw as our sexual freedom. For so many of us, it was HUGE.
As historians, we learn that ideas and events always happen within the context of other ideas and events. To a world that has been coping with the life threatening sexual plagu
e of AIDS for several generations now, it may seem bizarre to try and understand the much less inhibited time of sexual revolution that was experienced by so many who came of age during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Back then, 1984 was still a book by George Orwell all about some totalitarian state far off into the distant future.
And back then, monogamy was on the way out. It seemed like an idea whose time had passed. Like colonialism and feudalism, it belonged to the world of yesterday. It may still have been something for our moms and dads, but not us.
People shouldn’t own each other. People should be free. We were all about being free. Tie two birds together and neither can fly.
The popular access to birth control pills and the established cures for the previously life threatening diseases of syphilis and gonorrhea had truly rocked the world and gave us a sexual freedom beyond what any people had ever tasted before.
“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.”
The great demon of jealousy fed like an overstuffed firestorm on all the helpless chaos we provided it during this time.
And just as I had struggled with Lucy and Melody over these kinds of issues, I now struggled with Carly over the same.
Chapter Forty-Four
That night, the three of us went to bed together. I pushed for it. I wasn’t looking for any clusterfuck stuff, I was thinking more like a your turn, my turn kind of thing.
I gave them room to go first, but Carly soon turned her attention to me and he got up and left. I made love to her that night the way a man makes love to his wife.
In the morning, the other guy was gone. It was appropriate. I won a war that I thought I had no intention of fighting. I had been willing to settle for just a share.
