PAGAN
LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS
6.
Sally’s Opal
There
were still so many places to try... Sure, Arizona and New Mexico had been bummers but this
was winter! Winters aren’t easy on poor people. They get nerves. They worry.
They get cold. They get bored and uptight. Spring was just a few months away though.
We’d have buckets of fun then everywhere we went. And man! There were wonderful
places to travel in Spring. We could go to Canada! Wouldn’t Georgia love that expanse
of fragrant wilderness! We’d travel it from one end to the other, Montreal to
Vancouver. Oh! There were such places to go. Such wonderful places to go...
But Georgia said
she had had enough. She figured her boss would give her back her job. She wanted me to get
a job too, fix up the MG, get constructive, get normal.
It sounded like
a trap to me: the kind of trap that practically everyone falls into. As lucky as I was to
have developed my ability to wander on the wind, I just couldn’t see trading it in on
a small dingy apartment and gooky neighbors who worried more about the hair oil on their
pompadores than Indian rights, people who had never given a moment’s thought to the
new people’s movements, new freedoms... My mind brimmed over with visions comparing
these two opposite possibilities. I agreed to hitchhike back to California with Georgia --
not to stay though. I intended to turn back around as soon as I dropped her off.
California. So plastic. So soft. So uncaring.
So selfish. So dangerous. So easy to be jailed away and forgotten forever.
We sat on our
packs beside the freeway in Arizona waiting for a ride. I had the map out and was noticing
the highway to Tucson veered South a mile behind us. I’d rather be in Tucson than
California any day. But Georgia wanted to go
home. I’d promised to see her there safely. But every time I entered California I
worried whether I could get out again.
I didn’t
want to go there now.
A family car
with California plates pulled over; man and wife and a kid. I asked the driver if he was
going all the way to California. When he responded that he was I asked him to take
especially good care of my lady friend because I couldn’t come along. He said he
would do that. Georgia protested a little but
I adamantly refused to return any further west with her. She would be safe; I knew that.
After they drove
away I picked up my pack and me and Gush-gush walked back to the highway that headed south
to Tucson.
***
I really tried
to avoid the drop-in center this time. I didn’t trust myself not to try that shed
again. I totally stayed away from the main building in particular, even going to the
length of crossing to the other side of the road when I walked by to make sure no one saw
me. I didn’t want the staff to know I was back in town.
So in the
evenings I would look and look for somewhere to sleep—but inevitably—some nights
I had no choice but to return to the shed. I had to get some shut-eye! A human being has
to sleep. It’s a law of nature: A person has to sleep. And some nights the only place
for me to sleep was in that lousy shed. They’d put a lock on the shed’s entrance
since my last time in town but someone else had already busted it off. I knew they’d
probably think I had done it. I was worried about cops busting in on me while I slept,
beating me up. Many nights I seemed to sleep with one eye open and one ear alert—if
that can be called sleeping. At least it was better than staggering around alleys
half-awake, hiding from the revealing illumination of street lamps and freezing. The shed
was warm. The shed was all there was.
Now I resolved
to be wiser than before—I made sure I awoke at the crack of dawn to make my
exit—and I always took a careful look around until I was positive no one saw me
before I slipped out. I must have survived at least a week thanks to those tactics before
Gush-gush barked playfully and I was almost caught: almost but not quite. Me and Gush were
out and gone quick as a wink and hiding down the alley. The light on in the building
indicated someone had been working late. From where I hid I could hear two of them come
out to check the shed, talking together. Then they went away. Gush-gush and me returned
later that same night; and on following nights we continued to sleep in there whenever we
absolutely couldn’t find anywhere else. We just didn’t have any alternative.
I kept Gush
quiet after that and there were no more close calls. Actually as my luck continued I got
to thinking I was pretty much forgotten by the staff—or that they had finally decided
to just let me be. After all—I wasn’t harming anyone sleeping there. How much
humanity would they require to just let me sleep in that little shed a few hours every
night? Yeah, I thought they’d finally found their consciences and decided to leave me
alone, either that or else they’d forgotten all about me... At least that’s what
I thought until one day I got brave and strolled inside the building looking for a friend
and one of the staff spotted me and yelled —“THERE HE IS!!” at the
top of his lungs, startling everyone sitting around the rooms and ensuing a Larry, Moe and
Curly chase through corridors and offices that left the place looking like a tornado had
hit it. I guess they recognized me.
I slept one
night on the rocks inside an aqueduct. The next day I was walking by the place and noticed
the water level was up to the brim of the ten-foot in diameter concrete tube and roaring
in full flood. Someone told me it often
happens suddenly lake that when ice breaks up in the mountains. Nice to know. Nothing like
a sudden midnight swim through concrete tunnels at thirty miles per hour with no air
space.
***
It was about
that time that I met Sally. Tucson had a lot of New Yorkers and Sally was one of them. She
had that New York accent and the attitude too. She was quite capable of telling anyone
what was what, in no uncertain terms. But it was the New York sensitivity of hers that got
me. She could talk with a person for hours nonstop and she could listen real good; and she
always fixed tea or coffee for me when I came to visit.
We met through
our mutual interest in jewelry. I had picked up a huge piece of rough gray blue opal from
a local dealer who didn’t realize what he had and I had borrowed an ordinary
grindstone and cut it into a sixty-three carat oval cabochon with magnificent fire. I
needed someone to set it into a bracelet so I could show it off in various places. It
could help me significantly if I could become known to have some artistic abilities that
might equate money. This opal could definitely do that. So I heard about Sally; she did
silverwork out of her small house. Sally was really impressed with my opal. She
couldn’t get over the fact that I had created it with the simplest equipment, a
hundred grit grinding wheel and an electric motor. I had brought all my rubies along with
me on this trip too. I had them wrapped in a velvet and leather pouch deep in my pack. I
offered to trade her a finished star ruby in return for mounting my opal in a custom
silver bracelet. She considered that very fair.
As she worked on
my bracelet the friendship that began to form went far beyond jewels though. Sally was a
small brunette, in her late twenties. I loved her eyes the way she sipped her tea and
looked at me as she talked; I loved the zestful spirit with which she worked the silver. As the days passed we did many things together.
One night we
were sitting out in the front seat of her truck having just returned from a craft show
where I had given her a little assistance. We were talking about various things, like how
she had happened to come out to Arizona from New York—and she revealed to me that she
had been a prostitute back in The City. Not an everyday streetwalker though she
stressed—but rather a very high priced “date”. A man would telephone her in
her fancy apartment and she would talk to him and get to know him on the phone and decide
whether or not she wanted to go out with him. Her lifestyle was such that she could afford
to be very picky. She told me that some men didn’t even want sex!! —They just
wanted excellent female companionship. But they paid just as high a price no matter what
they got for their money.
I was real
surprised at her revelation because she is such a sweet thing, and industrious, too. I
never would have guessed that secret of hers unless she had told me. So we talked about
that profession for a while. I had all kinds of questions, sex being about my most
favorite activity and the diverse ways of people being an intense curiosity to me. Like it’s probably the reason I get so much
out of constant travel. And Sally seemed like she needed to talk about those things, maybe
to rearrange them a little for her own self, I don’t know. But we sat close and we
kissed a little too, while we were talking. I think her house was cold and her truck had a
heater was why we sat out there. It was winter...
So, we got to
talking about various sexual techniques. She told me she used to be famous for her
techniques and she began to elaborate. She
really got me involved then -- to think I was actually sitting with a beautiful woman who
knew sex like a scientist knows nuclear physics. I was aroused. After my imagination had
taken as much of it as I could and I felt I was going to burst, I said to her:
“Sally!
We’ve been getting to be good friends over the past few days, and that’s one of
the most important things in life. But here you are telling me about these amazing sexual
techniques... I love sex, but I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who practices
it like a virtuoso violinist practices her art. I am enthralled! So please, don’t
misunderstand me, I want our friendship to continue forever—so, don’t get me
wrong, but—would you give me some head, please, please, pretty please?...”
Imagine that!
She really didn’t know if I might just be humoring her to be polite! The beauty of
some women! The humility! What a gift head can be sometimes! Too bad the world is so
warped that that art will never be widely understood and poor wonderful girls like Sally
will feel confused. I assured her how much I wanted this treat. I implored her. She
unzipped me and slowly went down.
I am forty-five
years old at the moment (1992). Never in my life, before or since have I ever met a woman
who could do such sheer perfect pleasure to me. And I have surely had more head in my life
than a great many men. I am tempted to try to describe Sally’s art, but I don’t
want to make this literary work far more x-rated than it perhaps needs to be to portray
the vibrant sexuality of those wonderful days. I will go so far as to say a few things:
she made millions of bubbles swirl round and round up and down. I don’t know how she
did that and I’ve never met anyone else who knew how. Also she made the climax build
and build and build until the gusher was maximum huge -- and finally, she drank every
drop.
I’d never
known a prostitute before, or in Sally’s case I should say, an ex-prostitute, but I
wondered if they all always drink the cum. I asked her and she said she didn’t think
most of them did, but that she always did.
What a sweet
friend Sally turned out to be. I visited her often and we made love from time to time. I
suppose it is necessary that I add this fact—as she explained it to me—she
believed sex should be a free thing between friends; she would never again charge money
for it. That’s why she had gotten into making jewelry, an honest art that she also
excelled in and something that could pay her bills.
There was only
one small problem with our friendship. She had a strict rule: she never let any man sleep
overnight in her house. Never. Not me, not
any man. No matter what the circumstances. No matter how good a friend. Never. I still
think that is strange, as much as I desperately needed a safe place to sleep that winter.
***
One solution to
the sleeping situation was the girl’s dormitory over at the college. Often if a guy
had a girlfriend there and he felt too tired to drive home he might just fall asleep on a
couch out in the waiting room and no one would say much. Although I didn’t have a
steady girlfriend I did get to know a couple of them fairly well, and on several nights I
managed to sleep on a couch undisturbed. Late one night the cops shook me awake and I told
them I’d fallen asleep while waiting for a girl to come down. They had her paged.
Fortunately I had prearranged the ruse with her just in case and when she came down she
backed me up to the cops even though it got her in trouble with the dorm mother. Neither
did it go over big when before I left I had to reveal that there was a secret dog also
stowed-away in the room. Everyone jumped when I called Gush-gush and the St Bernard
crawled out from behind the sofa.
On another night
I myself slept hidden behind the same sofa but on that occasion I was discovered by a bevy
of young plutocrats and had to make fast tracks into the night.
After that I
still went to the dorm to visit the girl occasionally during daylight hours. She was a
homey-sweet student; pretty too. But there was no use me even trying to crash on or behind
that couch ever again; they were wise to me. I’d have to seek out some other
nocturnal abode. Then something really lousy happened.
I was over at
the dorm visiting her and her girlfriend one afternoon. They shared a room and by then I
had developed a good thing with both of them. Dogs weren’t allowed inside of course,
so I had tied Gush to a bush. The rope wasn’t very long, about four feet, but I
wasn’t planning to stay in the dorm long so I figured it would be ok. I left him a
can of water. I suppose I was up there for about an hour.
When I came back
down Gush-gush was gone.
For the next few
days I got no leads on what had happened to him. I
put up posters all around the college and on the third day one paid off. Someone told me
they knew who the culprits were and where my dog could be found. It turned out that some
frats had discovered the St Bernard puppy on the short tether and figured it was a cruel
thing to do to an animal. So they had freed him and taken him back to their room. Thanks to the informant I discovered the name of
the kid who had my dog. His last name was
Blatt. But he was no longer at the college; he had flown home to Kansas City—and
taken Gush-gush with him on the plane in a kennel cage. My mother had just sent me some
money so I went to a payphone and telephoned every Blatt in Kansas City until I found the
kid’s parents. The dad was as bad as his son. He told me the dog now belonged to his
son because I had mistreated it and that if I wanted to fight them about it I could come
to Kansas City and take them to court. Heatedly he told me he would pay excellent lawyers
any amount of money necessary to keep the dog. I got pretty heated too, but getting angry
did me no good. He was a well-to-do man and he was used to having power over people.
Several more
phone calls followed to both the dad and the son during the next day or two. They were
always real rude.
I telephoned the
Kansas City police and gave them the details. I was sure I was in the right. The cops went
over and talked to the Blatts. But from the
nowhere results of that meeting I got the impression more than ever that the Blatt family
had a lot of power in their community, because the cop told me after their meeting with
the Blatts that the police department couldn’t do anything further unless I went to
Kansas City to file charges. The cop didn’t sound very sympathetic. He told me he
doubted I would ever get my dog back no matter what I did. He said the Blatts were
determined to keep the dog.
I could just see
myself hitchhiking to a totally strange city like Kansas City and living under some bushes
while I dealt with their city police daily—and courtrooms and prosecutors and judges
and an uptight ivy-league family who had everything money could buy. The Blatt father
sounded so evil on the phone. I figured I’d need a weapon to protect myself from him
if I went there to try and get my dog back. When I thought like that I really got scared.
I don't have any weapons and I don't want any. But he had made it clear to me on the phone
that he had no such principals. And he was an "upstanding" well-to-do rat in his
community. There was no hope of anyone in Kansas City being on my side. Not a scruffy
vagabond draft-dodger like me. They'd lock me away at the drop of a hat. I could just see
myself rotting the rest of my life away in prison, as a result of trying to protect myself
while I tried to regain my dog. No good at all those frenzied visions. No good at all...
Gush-gush
was my dog... he helped me through the hardest, loneliest time in my life... he was my
closest friend.... I never mistreated him like they were making out....
I
told Blatt what Gush-gush had meant to me since I got out of prison. Blatt guaranteed me
if I came to Kansas City and tried to get back my dog—he would make sure I went back
to prison. Somehow I believed he could actually do that. He was a terribly evil-sounding
man.
So
I had a long talk with the sky, as usually happens with me in such times; it went
something like this:
“Good-bye
Gush-gush. I’m sorry. I just never have had any power in this world. When I am right
and they are wrong the fact that I am right has never mattered to them. I am of no
consequence to them. I am anathema to them because I believe a new world is trying to
dawn, a world where people who steal puppies or babies from less fortunate people will be
the bad guys, and where their victims will be considered the good guys.
You
are a gentle dog Gush-gush. Perhaps the creator intends for you to teach that family how
to have a heart.”
***
In the park one
day I got to wrestling around with some kids and the 63 carat opal in the silver bracelet
broke in half. I put the two pieces in my pocket with the intention of seeing if Sally
could make a new bracelet using the pieces but one piece somehow fell out of my pocket and
got lost. I gave the remaining half to Sally to keep.