PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

2. Not Enough Hair

        My mother let me use her car a few times and I began driving the little stationwagon to the nearby towns of Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. They were a lot more hip than Huntington; they were full of artists, musicians and free souls. I was looking for my heart, of course, for the final surcease of the terrible loneliness. If I could have found some brothers and sisters who would have understood what I’d been through during the previous two years I would finally have mellowed considerably.  But I was meant to learn a hard lesson about the superficiality of the culture into which I had been putting so much stock.

        They had cut my hair regularly in prison and I’d had to shave every day. So, when I was released I looked so clean-cut no counter culture brother or sister could tell me from a used car salesman. This was October 1972 and the people I was looking for would in no way trust anyone who walked this life with hair shorn and beardless.   When I went up to groups of them in Laguna Beach or Newport they turned their backs to me and walked off. When I insisted on trying to join in one of their conversations they skittered away, disappeared. They didn’t even want to be seen talking to a short-hair. It might soil their image, might cast doubts on their own allegiance to the sub-culture. Strange but true.

        I became angry. I’d gone to prison for them—to be treated like this? I had never imagined brothers and sisters could be shallow! Angrier still, when I voiced these feelings to someone with whom I managed to strike up a conversation—only to be accused of having gone to prison not for any good reasons as I maintained—but because I had bad karma!!! It followed that whenever we’d cross paths again I’d be callously ignored.

        So it struck me that apparently I’d have to just sit back and bide my time and wait for my hair and beard to grow back before I could ever be treated again as a full-fledged brother to these brothers and sisters—who had been occupying practically my every thought since I’d been stuck in that lousy prison! Yikes! Hair grows SLOW: What was I supposed to do in the meantime? Wow. After eighteen months of that lonely metal and cement cage—here I was finally once again among my people and I was just as lonely as I had been in prison! So I walked around Newport Beach waiting for my hair to grow.

        And on top of all that, my 25 year old body was a typical male body after all, and it had been confined for eighteen months in a cell, and it was aching to do the sort of things young male bodies love to do.  But since I had short hair I was excluded from any possibility of that within the hippy community of my heart. Arghhhhhhh! Love didn’t seem to want to show Her lovely face to me! So before long I began to wonder: couldn’t I at least meet some young woman—maybe not necessarily a sister so to speak, but just a regular woman from regular short-hair society—and release two years worth of pent up sexual energy? It was worth a try...

        So there I was walking down the boulevard in Newport Beach in quest of a simple piece of tail. Gross! Disgusting! In the world of my heart brothers and sisters gave love freely to each other. We made LOVE... for that is the true nature of Heaven. But I seemed to be locked out of that bliss: shunted down to the next level below Heaven, where men wish and wish and are ever unfulfilled. Hungrily I searched.

        I met two girls in a cafe. They were young but they conversed avidly, intelligently. They seemed to have genuine interest in the things I spoke about, hitchhiking adventures, and Colorado communes and stuff.

Their large dreamy eyes made them the perfect audience. I read their Tarot cards as we sat at the table getting to know each other; the black velvet cloth under the colorful cards, the neon sign just outside our window, the waiter silently refilling our coffee cups... Big beautiful eyes watching each magic card turning over mysteriously -- oohs and ahhhs... We sat in there for a couple hours. I don’t remember what else we talked about except that they seemed to know things about the local junior college where I was considering starting classes. One said she was a sophomore, the other a freshman. We got to feeling pretty good talking in that cafe. There was definitely a powerful mutual attraction going on, I guess something clicked between us because I definitely seemed to be making headway in the direction my arrow was pointing.

The evening was sweet and wonderfully relieved all the tension that had been building up in me for two years. But afterwards the girl I had thought was a college girl confessed to me she was only seventeen. I sure didn’t want to be having a relationship with a seventeen year old at that critical time of my life. I resolved to be more careful about such things in the future.

***

I came to think more and more how it was society had done a heinous thing to me—twisted my heart and broke my life with their trumped-up prison sentence... They’d warped some of my perceptions of things—like my ability to decipher the age of that girl perhaps—but the blame was on them, not me. They had no right, to break me on their rack the way they’d done, for my so-called “crime” of conscientious objection to a cruel war. That terrible imposition they had put on me, the helmet-of-pain headache, the damned short-haired, beardless pariah state of being—all that was their doing. Who were they anyway? Overlords of doom, pseudo-gods of money, real estate, merchandise of death!! God! Who really knew WHO they were? I was twenty-five years old. I was supposed to KNOW things... I was expected to have accumulated some wisdom. But I didn’t know exactly who they were: I only knew that they had manipulated the mutilation of my life and that given any chance at all, they would probably continue to do so.

If I remained within their reach I could only expect them to ball up my life again and again. How could they be expected to do other than that? They were trained attack dogs that had learned to love the taste of human blood. (In those days the image of the Kent State victims was always foremost in our minds when we attempted to analyze their class psychosis...) I knew more than ever that I had to find the eternal commune, the mystical, land beyond the madness. And I knew it wasn’t likely I’d find it in Southern California.

One other thing I knew was that the terrible headache, had improved considerably with the release manifested by lovemaking. So, I knew I was on the right track and that if my feet ever found their way back to the right paths, I would eventually heal myself of that malady, too. However, the experience with the young girl would not sit well in my mind.

Yes, a man deserves healing. But if I could have proscribed my own medicine I would have preferred to have been healed by an Earthsister, by someone who had molded herself into the eternal form of the cave-goddess healers of our human antiquity. I should have easily found her in Laguna Beach, lovecenter of pagan wisdom and mystic arts. She would have instantly known how desperate were the needs of my heart after eighteen months confinement for refusing to participate in the great killing machine. She would have taken me into her heart and made me whole again. A priestess of ancient love rites would have glorified in Her service. But Earthsisters climb their intellectual/spiritual ladder into the sky, only half knowing the nature of the priestesshood that awaits them at the top – and too often stop and cling to rungs going neither up nor down, afraid to attain the top where they will have to abandon the blind traditional heartlessness of our nature. To heal without prejudism. Earthways are a tangle of old compromises, well worn into their psyches by uncountable generations of patriarchal societies. The somnambulism has grown comfortable; they fear to open their eyes and rise and take up their heartpowers in a new world. Undescribable things hold them back. They must leave the values of this world and pass through the veil to find the Love they need.

        But the girl had deigned to bless me, and herself, with ancient medicine. Looking back, I believe the passionate young girl was a priestess of life indeed, beyond the pale of mere Earthly wisdoms she was enmeshed with all the energies of all the brilliant stars of the womb of heaven.