Ron's Journal 04B

The debauchery wound down sometime between moonset and sunrise. People who collapsed under shelters were OK. Those who fell asleep in the open woke with terrible sunburns. I was in a tent with five girls and two other guys. Whew, I was safe, from the sun anyway. But I awoke with a mouth on my cock. Is nothing safe?

The action continued all the long weekend along the Parker Strip. Hormones and secretions flowed. Skin burned. Powerboats roared by throughout all the daylight hours. All laws of man and nature were broken.

Damn, that was fun!

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The huge Sodom-on-the-river clusterfuck started disbanding mid-afternoon of the last day. Traffic was jammed and slow as zillions of vehicles crammed the two-lane highway for the 250-mile drive to L.A.

I caught a ride with a vanload of exhausted late-night stragglers. They were going to Pasadena, but I got off halfway back in Yucca Valley to stay at some friends' high-desert commune. I hooked my cheap light nylon-string hammock between two fake saguaro cacti for the night.

This commune was home to a weird cult -- weird, because it actually made sense. The founding 'guru' was a cynical humorist; his writings satirized religion, belief, all that crap. The cult's goal: enlightenment. But not Zen-type mystic enlightenment, no. Cult members were dedicated to happiness via not being fooled, knowing that media messages were bullshit, knowing that meaningful honesty really is the best policy.

I was awakened by smiling people pulling me out of my hammock, my sleeping bag, my clothes, and tossing me into a horse-watering trough to clean off. Once I was scrubbed, I was fed a fine breakfast of quail eggs, mesquite-bean chili with rock-wren meat and wild onions, fried yucca roots, and strong ephedra tea. Wow!

I was not a member, just a friend, so I had no fuck-privileges here. They were a fun crowd anyway.

I thumbed a ride to the Interstate with a local park ranger. Mabs was short, silver-haired, maybe twice my age, and lively and funny. As it happened, I was in college classes with her and her hot young botanist daughter Leonie six-odd years later. Leonie and I fucked then, too. But that was later.

Mabs chastely kissed me good-bye and dropped me at the bottom of Morongo Grade, below two-mile-deep Whitewater Pass, just before the L.A. and Palm Springs onramps.

I remembered an old-timer talking about driving up the Morongo Grade before it was paved, when it was just a gravel road to the high desert. He told me he saw a dust cloud up ahead and wondered who was driving there. He sped up, caught the other vehicle -- and found he was chasing himself! Yeah, sure...

Back to now. A car slowed as it descended the grade. A VW bug, good! The car pulled over next to me. Great! The driver was an attractive blonde in denims. Superb! She was not going far on the freeway, but would take a side road to a town between San Boogaloo and San Diego. Hey, I was in no rush to reach L.A.

Astrid drove us past the rugged Badlands and into dry farming country. We chatted. I played harmonica. We chatted more, touched hands, laughed. We felt a spark between us. She stopped at a deserted intersection and we kissed. Lotsa tongue action there, mmmm...

Just before we reached the next Interstate, she said she would like to take me home to meet... her two husbands. TWO husbands. I "suddenly remembered" I had to make an important phone call. I thanked her for the ride, kissed her goodbye, and thumbed north, back to San Boogaloo and Lyn's house.

I wondered later if the "two husbands" remark was real, or a test. If the latter, then I flunked. Damn.

I knocked on my little sister Lyn's door. She hugged me, then slapped me for leaving her with just a note, then hugged me again, and went back to her work. I made chicken-upside-down-cornbread for dinner.

[Recipe: Make a thick chicken-vegetable stew, with no potatoes. Pour it into a baking pan. Cover it with cornbread batter. Bake until the cornbread is golden. Flip the baking pan upside-down on a platter, so all the stew juice runs into the cornbread. Mmmm...]

After dark, Lyn and I lay together in her big porch hammock, watching the muddy stars, sipping wine, and chatting. No sex, not yet, that was still a few years away. For now, just sibling affection.

Lyn made me an offer. Stay with her, free room and board. Enroll at the local state college. Ask Dad for money for books and tuition, not too steep then. It would essentially be a free ride for me. All I had to do was apply myself to it, concentrate, and quit drifting.

I told her I would think about it. She said nothing more. We fell asleep together there.

I will not bore you with all my considerations, but I decided against accepting. I wanted to be back in San Francisco. I was not ready for stability yet. And I still had to undergo more life-changing events.

I had yet to learn: IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING, YOU'LL PROBABLY END UP SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Now I was truly done with Southern California for a few years. I thumbed back to Hollyweird. I kissed and fucked my girlfriends good-bye. My intermittent wife MariLyn and I loaded our packs and headed north.

NEXT: MariLyn and I return to San Francisco.