Damien's Lair
You would think she had better left her heart in San Fransisco. But how was she to know? And this my friends is the real tragedy. You never know who your true friends are, until they stab you in the back. This is the story of a girl who thought she knew, but in reality she knew nothing. It all started in late july in the year of 1967. She was living in a hippie commune in San Francisco. There she felt happy, she felt loved and cared for. Her parents had never really loved or cared for her in any obvious way. They had been all out of love since they had spent most of it on her older brother who was lost in Vietnam. When she started to object to the war and told them that the US should get their troops out of Vietnam her parents threw her out of the house. She decided to go west and eventually she wound up in San Francisco with these hippies. She loved them and she thought they loved her. In the commune everything and everybody was shared by everybody, there was no yours or mine. Complete equality was the norm. Of course the fact that they were almost all girls helped. The only guy in the commune was Damien, he didn't participate much in the housework, but nobody seemed to mind since he was such a nice and kind man. All of the girls had past experiences with violent men so a man who didn't speak with his fists was seen as a blessing, that he didn't do much other than smoke weed and have sex with them was not considered to be a big problem. They were just happy that he didn't hit them. The girl, who's name was Betty, was no exception, her father had not exactly been kind to her. Hitting had been his prefered form of communication and Betty had been in constant fear of him and his violent temper. It had gotten worse towards the end and if she had stayed home any longer she would probably have been killed by now. That she wasn't killed when she told her father that she thought the war was wrong and that Lyndon Johnson was a murderer was completely due to her mother who managed to persuade her father to just throw her out of the house and disown her instead of beating her.
Betty was very much in love with Damien, as was the other three women in the commune. Damien had something about him that made women fall for him, and it wasn't just the fact that he wouldn't hit them. He had a way of making himself seem vulnerable and helpless that somehow brought out the loving and nurturing side of almost any woman. But he was also a very intelligent man who knew a lot about all kinds of different stuff. The girls would listen to him for hours and believed and agreed with every word he said, it all seemed to make so much sense that they didn't even think to question him. When he said that he couldn't do the dishes because he had to think after dinner because that's when your brain is the most receptive to big thoughts, they didn't as much as bat an eyelid. When he said that he couldn't clean the toilet because he had to write an essay on the necessity of women's liberation they felt like he was the only man in the world who considered women to be equal to men. And how can you accuse such a man of being a lazy male chauvinist pig? How could you demand that a man such as him, who had so much to think about and so many important political essays, articles and pamphlets to write, how could you expect him to be concerned with such lowly things as housework? That this didn't really make any sense and that who does the housework is a political question as well was not something they thought too much about. And besides, Damien had said that all housework should be socialised, in other words the state should pay the women for the housework that they do. This sounded like a good idea to the girls and they accepted that until that day would come they would have to continue to do unpaid housework without any help from him. At least the fact that there was four of them made it a little easier. They could help each other,unlike their mothers who had to do it all on their own.
The house they lived in was owned by Damien. He had inherited it from his parents, who had died when he was 18. He was now 28. The girls were all younger than him. Betty was the youngest at 17.Then there was Molly who was 20, Rachel who was 23 and Denise who was 25 and the one who had known Damien the longest. None of the girls had a job so they were totally dependent on Damien. Damien worked as a journalist for a small underground paper called The Red Mole. He wrote most of his articles at home so he almost never had to leave the house.