Am I remembering?

Or is it something from a lifetime ago?

Before we were we, when you were you and I was me.

It was a crazy time.

The streets were burning, and I was there.

Did I know you then? No, I don't think so. I would remember.

I knew you were near, though. I could feel you. I know that now.

All I knew then was that there was ... something ... incomplete ... about the way I was living.

And behaving.

My parents would never have understood. Or even recognized me. During that time.

Sex. And drugs. And rock and roll. There was fighting in the street. I was a street-fightin' man. I was living a songwriter's dream.

Marching and getting maced and looking at Hell's Angels dressed up as "security" and crying for the fallen here at home and cursing the fallen across the sea in another world and then going back to our little places to drink and eat and smoke and lose ourselves in sweat and saliva and secretions.

Am I remembering?

I think so.

Nothing succeeds like excess. And I excelled at excess.

A dozen or so of us in a small 2-bedroom apartment, a few in the kitchen fixing dinner for all of us, the rest in the main room, no lights on, candles everywhere. Groups of two or three on the couch, on the floor, in front of the dark television. On the closet floor.

The music loud, a faint blue-white haze near the ceiling, Jimi and Janis, Airplane and The Lizard King looking silently on from the walls. I'm passing the pipe, taking as big a hit as I can. I'm lying on the couch, with another whose name I cannot recall, the two of us getting as close together as we can on the narrow cushions, me wedged into the back, she on top. I hand her the pipe, she takes a toke, then leans over and passes it to another on the floor below her. She settles back onto me, her head on my chest. She sings softly along with the music as she is lying there. I have one arm around her shoulder, holding her tightly to me, my other hand is under her shirt.

I loved that time. Freedom. Independence. Radicalism. Free expression. Explorations of life, love, sexuality.

No bras.

I loved that time.

A contented purr comes unbidden from her as I play with her turgid nipple. She is a rail-thin waif with long brown hair, straight as a ruler, down to the middle of her back. I could smell her shampoo. She is dressed in bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed t-shirt, one bare foot rubbing up and down my shin, the other pressed tightly against my foot. Slim-hipped, her breast is small but pliant, and she enjoys the attentions I am paying to it.

I feel her jerk slightly and shift her weight. She lifts up and kisses me, hard, her lips insistent, her tongue searching. She gasps into my mouth, and sucks my tongue into her mouth. She moans, breaks the kiss, and her head falls back, her eyes closed, her breathing rapid, her face flushed. I feel her moving, nearly undulating, on the couch. I look down our entwined bodies and see another's arm, nearly disembodied in my enhanced state, snaking up from the direction of the floor. There is no hand attached, the arm seemingly ending just above the wrist as it disappears under the unbuttoned fly of her jeans. The arm moves, flexes, moves. Her body writhes in concert with the movement of the arm.

I struggle up to a sitting position, and the scene evolves into something more real, more unreal.

One of my roommates, on the floor. It is his arm I see, his hand is stroking my girl's slit, his finger waging its own tiny war with her clitoris. His eyes are also closed, as he is concentrating on the sensations being created by the artist with him on the floor, an artist in fleshly pleasures. She is nearly the twin of the one on the couch, with somewhat darker hair and larger breasts. Her shirt is open, his jeans are undone. His left hand is entwined in her hair, gripping, expressive in its intensity, as she is sucking hard on his cock, her cheeks hollowed with her efforts. As I watch, she brings her lips up to the crown, then plunges down until his pubic hair is tickling her nose. He groans. I groan in sympathy, in anticipation, in youthful exuberance, in sympathy again. The net effect is to make his finger buried deep in the pussy of the girl on the couch to clench, unclench, and clench again. This causes her to hunch against his hand, relax, then push up once more against his ministrations. I squeeze her breast hard, run my thumb back and forth across her nipple, then lean down and press my lips to her ear, and thrust my tongue into her ear canal. She whimpers, and whines, and cums hard on my roomie's hand. She turns her head and kisses me as ferociously as she can, as her mind whirls with the sensations of the three of us, the smoke, the smells, the sounds.

She slides the hand out of her jeans, and turns to me. She takes my hand, the one under her shirt, and pushes it down her belly until I feel the silken fabric of her panties. I rub her under her jeans, back and forth, hip to hip, on each swing of my pendulum reaching slightly lower. I can feel that her underwear is soaked through, and the sensation causes my heart rate to accelerate and hot blood to flow to my crotch, creating an almost delicious rigidity that aches for relief. She slips one leg underneath mine, while the other drops to the floor, creating more room for my hand and arm.

She, in turn, loosens my belt and tugs at the buttons holding my jeans together. She feels the dampness coating my underwear, then I feel her fingernails lightly scratch along the elastic, then snake underneath, and glancingly rub across the head of my cock. Constricted, still it throbs at the touch. Her fingers blindly, lightly explore, then move down, and hold on. She squeezes, then rubs up and down, then squeezes again. I hear a groan, and with surprise realize it's me that is groaning. In retaliation, I push her jeans down off her hips. She lifts up, allows me to reach behind her to remove them, then kicks them off her legs impatiently. She again positions herself to easily spread her legs, making herself available to my touch.

I lift myself up and begin to tug off my own jeans, now that they have been loosened. She helps, and they slip off like water, followed immediately by my underwear. She kisses me again, a hungry and demanding joining, our lips pressed almost painfully against each other's, our tongues battling for dominance like Indian finger-fighters. The pleasure of our mouths is matched by the pleasures of our hands. Hers abandon their gripping excercises to brush lightly downward, caressing my balls, exchanging the energy of their previous activity for gentle explorations. My fingers find again the soft down on her stomach, brushing once again back and forth across her waist, pausing at each passing of her navel to scratch lightly at the depression. I can feel her muscles shiver at each light search of her belly button, but my attention is still elsewhere, as she continues her own explorations of my balls. She rubs her fingertips underneath the sac, down toward my asshole, then slowly brushes them back up again, all the way to the base of my cock. Her actions cause my own stomach muscles to quiver, both of us lost in a feast of the senses.