PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

26. Tantra

        Up on the cliff face one morning I slept in a little later than usual feeling relatively safe since as steep as it was, and as high up, I’d still never been disturbed or discovered there. In the fog of my dreams I became aware of excited voices that might have been speaking about me...

“Over there, do you see? Just behind that bush. Do you see now?”

        “Oh, I see where you mean now. Yes, there he is. I see him.”

        Grogglly I rose myself up and looked in the direction of the voices. The Victor Hugo’s restaurant had an area where diners could enjoy their meals outside atop the seacliffs—and apparently a couple of people had decided to stand on their tables to get a better look at the panorama—and one of the things that had become more visible was me! I rolled up my gear as quickly as possible and disappeared at a good clip down the beach.

        I avoided the cliff for couple weeks, but good sleeping places being hard to find inevitably I began to use the cliff again. I just made sure I left at the crack of dawn. Anyway, I figured they’d probably forgotten all about me...

        NOPE!!!

        Walking in the sands along the cliffs one morning I saw a commotion taking place high up on the cliff-face—right in the exact vicinity of my sleeping ledge!

People were gathered curiously watching two cops rooting around up in my bushes, bringing the few things out that I had stashed there. I noticed they’d already brought down my bedroll and it lay in the sand at the foot of the cliff.  With everyone concentrating on the cops above I doubt if anyone noticed me surreptitiously pick it up and mosey away. Oh, well. That nifty noddery was one more thing that was nice while it lasted, but it too was gone forever.

***

        Early one morning a tall blond woman in a new Volkswagon camper picked me up hitchhiking. We got to talking and soon realized we were both equally horny and also both about as forward about our sexual freedom. We were also about the same age. The thing that made us different was that she was one of Laguna’s moderately wealthy people. At least she owned a fine home and didn’t have to work for a living and could play around all day doing whatever she wanted; and I’d sort of call that being pretty well off. She was built like an eternal love-Goddess too, which may have been her primal avocation for all I know. She was well-traveled and highly cultured.

        She told me her thing was Tantra Yoga. She pulled her VW over on an empty area of beach and we went for a roll in the sand. But she was being a tease. She kept telling me how she preferred clean sheets and how she was worried about getting sand up inside her pinkest pinkness. She was busily checking my fingers and fingernails to see how clean they were before she allowed them to do anything fiendish.

I lay on my back and she straddled me—and she ordered me not to move. She said if I so much as made a single movement she would get off and leave. She was adamant. After all that forewarning she slipped me inside… Then she just sat there still, totally unmoving. I sure couldn’t figure out how she expected anything to happen that way. When I tried to move, just a little, she hissed at me: “Stop it. right now!” So I stopped—and continued to wonder what the heck was going on. But just being there with her like that was plenty nice so I figured I’d let her indulge her idiosyncrasies. So I lay back and watched her.

        Then it began. Her inner muscles started doing some really weird stuff—although on the exterior neither of us was moving one little bit! It was exquisite. I’d never known something like that was possible. But when I allowed myself the tiniest thrust motion she got truly angry and ordered me once again to cease or it was over. So I controlled myself and let her do it her way. Outwardly both of our bodies stayed still as stone. But inwardly! Golly, golly, golly! I have never met any other woman who practices any similar method. Incredible.

        After that cosmic-erotic ride through innerspace I kept my eyes open for her rip-roaring yellow VW van, hoping to get a regular thing going. I saw her occasionally and we’d wave at each other and she even picked me up once or twice and gave me a lift—but that one experience was our sole wildness together—and no amount of urging could influence her to get it on a second time.

        I think I must have been a wild excursion into the underside of life for her. I suppose I wasn’t exactly someone she could introduce easily into her social set, or who would look groovy sitting beside her grand piano, much less wrinkling her jasmine scented sheets.

        It was about enough to make a poor young bum like me want to go out and get a day job as a stock broker or at least enter medical school.

***

One day I noticed a Goddess sitting on a cliff ledge! She was watching seagulls fly and her eyes soared with them—and slowly lowered to focus directly on my eyes—merging dreams and lightning bolts of celestial sparks: of all the thousands of eyes on the beach she was unabashedly steadily looking into mine. The hypnotic moment held us for maybe two minutes. Her gaze never wavered. They were the most amazing eyes I have ever seen. They were not from this world. She was obviously an eternal sprite from the center of all Creation. In awe, I refrained from approaching her -- but I sat there on the boardwalk and kept her in sight for hours.

        The next day was cloudy and no one was on the beach except some local die-hard street musicians—and her. She was sitting in the same place again; she had her top off and her beautiful breasts exposed. Her skirt was made of a colorful sea-thru material and she had one knee raised so that the skirt was hunched up to her waist fully revealing all her beauty. I took up my guitar and sat beside her and strummed some tunes. Another guitar player and a fellow with a harmonica came over and sat ten feet behind us and joined in the music. There was no one else on the beach but us. Silently the girl was watching me with her magnificent eyes—they were slightly slanted and were the most amazing natural green color that I have ever seen—and so dreamy... She began rubbing my feet as I played the guitar. After a little while she lay her head on my foot and began licking it. then she was sucking my toes. I can’t stand it when a girl sucks my toes! My pants were suddenly way too small. I set aside my guitar and slid next to her and kissed her. Rhythms of the eternal sea merged our souls and the musicians serenaded serendipitously behind us—and I slipped my man-feather inside her salty/sweet avenue of creation and we made love like rainbows and sunbeams and came like sweet brine and forever wine.

        She seemed to me to be an angelic incarnation of the Devine Mother of Creation

***

So on the one hand I encountered moments that seemed clearly to be celestial blessings, but in the same day I could also encounter quite the opposite!

There were the cliques of muscle-bound, well-to-do young hunks to contend with—each with his own Porsche or Corvette. They just knew they were God’s gift to the female species... I don’t mean to knock them necessarily. It’s just the way some of them leered at me with dogfish eyes... Being a bum in Laguna wasn’t the greatest thing in the world…

Everyone on the Laguna Beaches seemed to be members of the ruling class so to speak and they mostly saw me as an untouchable character. Sometimes I’d get insulted or terribly snubbed by some young woman, which of course is always hurtful, whenever it happens to anyone.

But then I would take my guitar and sit down not far away and play a song and maybe sing. On the crowded beaches this usually went over well and I usually recouped some lost respect—even from ritzy dismal damsels. Whenever I was without my guitar though, life was definitely harder. And my guitar was falling apart, warping, becoming unglued, more and more every day. So was I, in ways...

        I sat on the sands and dwelled in my heart pondering those social/cosmic ramifications. I came to the conclusion that I felt I was basically a kind human being. I meant no harm to any of them. I must have some value some place in this world, maybe not in Laguna, but somewhere. Darned if I knew where though.

By early April the weather was hot enough to cause people to come down to the beach in droves. I looked around and began thinking hard that I would probably never fit into that town. It was all a pipedream. I could live there only as a misfit, a bearded homeless guitar-player, never as a legitimate citizen. Never as a normal person. I was a young man, verile… There would always be pretty girls to make love with, if that is all I wanted out of life. But this scraggly, unwashed lifestyle in the beautiful beachsands of a millionaire’s city was getting old. I even started giving some thought to shaving off my beard and cutting my hair. Maybe I could then get a job as a matradee at Victor Hugo’s? Not likely…

Whenever I looked down at my hand I would see my large silver ring minus its ruby and I found it very depressing. Several times I returned to the place I had lost the stone and searched. It should have been there. But I never found it. My Triumph motorcycle was gone too. Even Demetrious was gone. My guitar became unusable and went into a  garbage can. My life seemed smaller now, and emptier. I just couldn’t see a future in Laguna…

***

        I met a girl with dark hair and an olive complexion. We walked northward along the beach to an area with no other bathers and lay nude on towels. We loved away the sweltering morning with steaming hot passions and sticky sweat merging and pouring like rivers over both of our wildly writhing bodies. Afterwards, as I dozed, she gathered her things and wandered off. I doubted I would ever see her again.

I hardly knew these women I was making love with.  And this last one, I had never even asked her what her name was, and she had not asked me mine. Other than the profound sexual escapade we had just shared, I knew nothing about her at all. And that’s pretty much how it always was. Why?

        I realized that I was finished with Laguna forever. All I could think of was cool Canada. Hot weather and salt and sand had been causing my hair and beard to itch uncomfortably. It might have even been sand fleas; I don’t know. My long hair didn’t seem necessary anymore.

        Overwhelmed by the idea I ran up to the Hari Krishna temple, where I had eaten often over the past year. A man lived next door who owned an Irish Wolfhound that used to like to frolic with Demetrious.  We’d spoken together only once or twice but he was a nice guy. I asked him if I could use his bathroom and borrow a scissors and a razor. Astounded, he asked me whatever for? I told him I wanted to shave and cut my hair, and I wanted to do it before I changed my mind. He laughed and showed me the way to his bathroom and provided me with the things I had requested. Half hour later a clean-cut young man walked out the door and thanked him.

I walked down to the rocks on the beach and took off my large silver ring. I gazed one last time at the sculpted couple entwined around the empty setting. The ring felt hefty in my hand. I heaved back and tossed it far out into the waves.