Chapter 8

San Francisco 1971

Well, time went on and the middle of August came and so did Laurie, home from her internship. I moved into a loft living situation down in the Mission District. Beanie hooked me up with the deal, as she knew a guy who was going to India and was looking for a sub lease on his space. Considering the view it had, it was great. But as the place had a lot of glass in the one part of the studio, it could get damn cold in there during the winter months. But it had a dark room in it, and that cinched the deal as far as I was concerned.

Compared to Laurie's apartment it was down right primitive. I cooked on a three burner stove that had to date from the 1910's and that I had to haul propane tanks for. I bought another tank while I lived there as there was nothing worst than having a home cooked meal half done when the gas ran out.

Along about February a choice plum of an assignment fell into my lap. A client of the ad agency wanted some shots of their new hotel in Kailua Kona and I loaded my back pack with gear and took off for the hot sun and warm waters of Hawaii for two and a half weeks. It was a week long shoot but I decided to take some vacation time and hike around the island and do some camping and picture taking.

While I was gone I'd given Beanie a key to my place and asked her to water the plants that I had promised to keep alive during my sublease. Well, I'd already failed in that, but the survivors would need a bit of attending to and Beanie was nice enough to do it for me. She had a room mate in her space for the winter who had just gotten involved with a guy and giving them the space to get it on in meant that she didn't have to listen to them in the middle of the night. I was fine with her wanting to stay at my place.

Well, everything you have ever heard about Hawaii is true. I landed at the airport and did the advertising photos on a medium format camera and got to meet a few models and other people who tipped me off on 'oh, you gotta see' sites on the Big Island.

A few days after I had started my hiking and camping, I ran into a woman whose friends had split to go to Maui for a few days, which wasn't any big deal. But then she got her back pack stolen and with it her ID and money as well ... She spent the night with me in my tent and we didn't fool around. I have some moral codes about situations and taking advantage of a woman in those circumstances just didn't feel right to me and so I didn't make a pass at her though I dearly wanted to. Once the weekend was over and the bank was open, she asked me if she could go with me and do some more camping?

I drove a hard bargain. I said, "As long as I can take pictures of you, yeah." If she'd have tried to negotiate on that, I would have folded right up.

Good looking doesn't ever begin to describe her. The two nights we had slept together in the tent, it was all I could do not to come onto her.

"There is one other personal thing about me that you should know." She drawled.

"What's that? I already know you snore."

She just grinned. "Nope, that's not it."

"What? You're wanted for murdering someone with your looks?"

She dimpled and I stirred the small cooking fire we had going. "Nope."

"Well, what is it then?"

"I'm so fuckin' horny right now that it's not funny. If you don't mind, I'm going to wear your ass out tonight."

And as casually as I could, I replied, "Oh? What if I'm not that kind of boy?"

"I'll convert you." She said seriously.

"Hey, Nance. I'm flat out heterosexual. The fish looks about right, don't you think?"

"Yeah." I turned the fish in the thin copper bottomed frying pan the butter was melting in and she put the salad bowl she'd been shredding the lettuce into between her legs and cut up tomatoes. I poured her another cup of wine and watched the Ahi tuna. I poured a little more wine on it, and squeezed a lemon over the top of it all.

"Smells good."

"Wait until you taste it." I promised.

"So. You okay with that?"

"What?"

"Fixin' my horniness."

"Sure. Be happy to help you out there with your little problem, Tex." I flipped the fish in the pan. Golden brown, looking good. And I was feeling a little surreal right at the moment. Who the hell was this guy being so cool with this goddess that wanted me to fix her horniness problem? Said goddess fired up a joint of pakalola and handed it to me.

"Ear." She said with that doper's short hand they use when they don't want to blow their toke and say the 'H' in front of the word. I took the joint and had a hit and handed it back to her.

She exhaled and raised an eyebrow at me. "What?" I said as I exhaled.

"Oh, jess thinking' about how laid back you California types are."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, if I'd a said something like that to one of the good ol' boys I know back home, they would have been all over me like a cheap suit."

"Well, I don't want to mess up dinner."

"That's what I mean. Every other guy I've ever been with would have said, fuck dinner. I like that you're not like that."

"Oh, I'm like that, all right. But if I leave the potatoes in the coals, they'll burn sure as hell."

"Well, it looks like at least one part of you is interested in the idea, anyway." I didn't even have to look down to see what she meant. It's pretty easy for a woman to tell when a guy is interested in her on a nude beach.

"Believe me, all of me is interested in that idea." I pulled the frying pan off the fire and slide a chunk of fish onto the plates. Then I fished the foil wrapped potatoes out of the coals with a fork and put one on each plate. She doled out salad portions and poured dressing on. I dug in and it was even better than I expected. I kind of got the idea that she liked it too, from her moan as she tasted the fish.

For the next several minutes, there was very little conversation as we stuffed our faces. But after the initial bout of gluttony we picked up the conversation where we had left off.

"God, this is good." She mumbled around a mouth full.

"Yeah. I've had the screaming munchies for the last half hour."

"Mmm."

"I just got to say one thing, though."

"What's that?"

"Good as this dinner is, I think I'm going to enjoy desert more."

"What's for desert?"

I grinned and said, "You."

She grinned back at me and licked her lips. It wasn't the fast sort of lick you do when you're cleaning your lips, either.

"My kind of desert." She said.

Well, for the next eight days we hiked through jungles, body surfed, did a bit of snorkeling, went to see the volcano, sat in a steam vent and fucked our brains out every way we could think of. We did it on the beach, in the ocean, in the steam vent, in the morning, afternoon and evening and during the night, and one time just as the sun was rising. And this wasn't just sex, which I had kind of worried might be the case with someone as good looking as Nancy was. Sometimes the very beautiful people are just awful in bed. To say it wasn't the case here is an understatement.

She loved oral as much as I did. Giving and getting', and there wasn't anywhere I could find an inhibition in her body.

One morning, she was sitting with her back against a tree and I had just poured us both coffee and put the pot back on the coals. She handed me the joint she had going, and I took a toke and offered it back to her, but she just shook her head. I was feeling kind of horny and she set her cup down and looked right at my cock and I walked over to her. She leaned forward and sweetly sucked me off while I stood there and sucked in a few tokes and had a few sips of coffee while she worked her mouth around on my dick and grabbed my ass with one hand and my balls with her other one and I thrust my hips into her face and would look up every now and then and seeing people on a beach about a hundred feet away from me swimming and sunning while she's doing my dick in a very sweet and sensual manner. Making it last and last until I was almost snorting as I breathed fast and then I started coming. She sucked it all out of me as I groaned and held her head lightly while her tongue did incredible things. And after I was through, she leaned back against the tree trunk, picked up her coffee, put a joint in her mouth and fired it up. She exhaled and looked up at me, grinning, and I smiled at her, and we didn't speak a single word from start to finish.

I knew all along she was going back to Dallas and I was going to be going back to San Francisco after this trip was over. I was very sad when we packed up the tent and hitchhiked over to the airport. I had changed around my flight so as to spend another few days with her. But it was still damn sad when we hugged good bye and she got on her flight to LA and I went and had some breakfast while killing a couple of hours before my interconnecting flight to Oahu and then to SF and felt like something was going that I wish I didn't want to go.

Yeah, we had done the address and telephone number exchange but I figured my chances of ever seeing her again were about zilch. It was one of those 'if you're ever in' and 'write me, won't you?' things. Now we were both going back to our 'real' lives and I doubted I'd ever see her again. You get to know someone when your traveling and hiking in a way you just don't get to see them usually. She did her share of the camp choirs, was philosophical about stuff that a lot of women I know would have been bitching about having to put up with and very easy to be with. A good trail companion doesn't ever begin to cover how much I liked her.

Liked? Hell, I was falling in love with her the first night, but knew that she was way out of my league and so I didn't tell her that. I sensed that a lot of guys had told her how much they loved her, so I just whispered in her ear just before she boarded the plane, "I'm going to miss the shit out of you," as I hugged her. And she nodded against my t-shirt and we hugged fiercely until the guy by the stairs coughed and said, "If you're going to make this flight, you should get aboard now." And she sniffled and smiled at me and went bounding up the stairs in her denim cut offs and turned and waved and said, "Write me now, ya hear?"

Then she was gone and I had to move back of the white line and I saw her face waving out the window on the jet liner and I waved back and stood there as it taxied out and flew off into the sky. I could still see the damn airplane and I was missing her already. For something that was just supposed to be a week long adventure, she was leaving a larger hole in my heart than a lot of women I'd been with in college and high school did.

But I just sucked it up and figured that it was not to be and that I'd always have the memories and that was about as good a deal as I'd get.

One of the things that I had done while we were backpacking around the island was to take a lot of photographs. Nancy had thought it was funny that I had such a big back pack as most people who did the camping on the beach trip had more like day packs for the stuff they needed in Hawaii. But the big pack had a hell of a lot of lenses and stuff in it and the camping stuff wasn't very much compared to that.

I had the color slide film processed at a lab we used in the Mission district and printed out some of the better shots when I had time. There were a lot of really excellent shots as I found out she was pretty photogenic. Some people the camera loves and some people can't take a decent picture at all. I thumb tacked a couple up over my desk and took and sent off some to her, thinking that she would like a souvenir of our trip. I also included a few scenery pictures and some close ups of some flowers. I tossed them into a box and wrote her a little letter, saying how much I had enjoyed our trip together and hoped that our paths would cross again and said that anytime she wanted someone to journey off to the ends of the Earth together, keep me in mind and I'd make the trip. Then I tossed it into the mail and hoped she'd like them and hoped even more that she'd write back or get in touch with me again. As she had to go do apartment hunting in Dallas when she got back, I didn't have a way to phone her directly.

Well, I settled back into my 'routine' and Beanie and some other lovers of mine warmed my bed and kept me fairly content sexually. One funny thing that had happened when I was gone was that Laurie (my sublease land lady) had found a box of my gear in the hall closet that I had forgotten and given me a call to come and get it. Beanie had answered the phone and said she was house sitting for me and had to go out that way any way and would pick it up. As she was coming out of the building, she'd run into lesbian Laurie and they'd struck up a conversation and one thing lead to another and they had fallen into an affair over at my new place, away from Laurie's up tight girlfriend.

And the reason I knew that was because I walked in on them showering in the bathroom together right after I got back. But I had to piss like a race horse, and the only other place in the studio was a sink full of dirty dishes which was not an option. I had figured it was just Beanie in the shower, and she'd already seen me pee on a few occasions, so I went for it.

Kind of funny, actually: Two heads peering out from behind the shower curtain and I'm standing there pissing away like crazy and saying it was totally cool with me, her having company over while I was gone and all. Laurie just gave me a grin and said hi while she watched me pee. I should have used the airport restroom while I was there but three bus rides and no restrooms between the airport and my place and all of that airplane coffee had caught up to me. And when I said I had to pee, it was a very, very, long drawn out one. "Wow, man, when you said you had to go, you sure weren't kidding!"

Bizarre what kind of things are memorable, isn't it? Having a 'how was Hawaii' conversation with a couple of women in my shower while I'm pee'ing my brains out and a lesbian's critique of my bladder capacity is just one of those things my mind finds worth remembering.

Well, after I was done draining a couple of quarts, I excused myself and left them to their shower and went out and raided the refrigerator for something to snack on. They came out, Laurie wearing my only bath towel, and Beanie stark naked. She jumped up on me and wrapped her legs around my waist and planted one hell of a welcome home kiss on me while Laurie went into the sleeping loft and got dressed. She brought down Beanie's clothes and I patted her on the ass and let her down onto the floor and dug out the lei I'd brought back for her and got it out of it's little plastic bag the lady selling them at the airport had put it in and draped it around her neck. She looked damn cute, wearing just the flowers.

I got out my carefully sealed up 'exposed film do not open in daylight' light tight boxes with the snaps on them and broke out some of the stuff the islanders were growing and we rolled up a few numbers and pretty soon we're all on cloud nine. Beanie had put on this ratty bathrobe of mine and it was cozy sitting around the table and chatting about what had been going on since we'd seen each other last. I told her of meeting a woman and how we'd traveled around and how we'd had a lot of fun together. Beanie's roommate had gotten hot and heavy with her new guy, and then broken up with him, or was breaking up with him for some reason or another. If I remember right, they were into the arguing stage of the break up and so she'd been hanging around my place. That was totally cool with me and I told her so. Then she asked if she could still use the place during the day? Giving a quick side glance to indicate Laurie and I told her that it would be fine with me anytime. Which got me another hug, with her bending over the corner of the table to do it and my hand finding it's way onto her naked-under-the-bathrobe back. And no, I didn't ask if I could watch. Just said that they could use my place anytime she wanted to, and if I came home and the bed was being used, I'd crash out in the big studio area on the couch that was in there.

That got me another hug and a whispered promise. "You are going to get so lucky!"

We sat around and chatted and drank Medalio del Oro coffee and by and by, the dishes in the sink got cleaned and the women cooked me a rather good chicken dish in the temperamental oven and we washed it down with a few bottles of white wine. It was around ten o'clock or so and I told them that I was still on 'getting up at dawn' time and was going to sack out in the studio. Beanie said they couldn't take my bed, and I just said it would be fine them using it, as 'let's face it, two people trying to sleep on that couch would be impossible, ' and they were pretty grateful about it, as Laurie's lover was out of town until the next night and I hadn't called to let them know I would be getting in that evening. What with the weed and the wine, I was out like a light as soon as I laid down.

Sometime during the night, I woke up and heard them making love. Once I identified what the noises were that had woken me, I went right back to sleep. But listening to someone having sex for just a short period of time was enough to get me hard as I was falling asleep and I dreamed about Nancy. And woke up the next morning with a bit of a crusty glaze all across my stomach for a souvenir and stumbled to the john with my hard on pointing the way and my eyes half shut.