Chapter 3

As you can tell, mine wasn't the typical mom. She was a rebel from the start, and to understand her, you need to know about her background.

Diana grew up in Denver, which despite its tourist image is a rather ordinary town, a city of the plains rather than the mountains. The Rockies float off to the west, distant blue peaks on the horizon. But visitors come here expecting the city to be special, and that affects the place. It makes Denver suspect it could be greater, that it has missed an opportunity.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Diana was a teenager, the city attracted a stream of rebellious drifters. They were similar to the high plains drifters of the late 1800s who had made it their base, lone outcasts, many of them burnt out by the Civil War. The later group emerged disillusioned from World War Two. They too were restless seekers for ever-new beginnings on an open frontier, this time a mental one. They were fleeing themselves and the constricting propriety of the homes that had produced them. The dislocation of the war had blown off society's lid and given these discontents a vision of other worlds of possibilities. They developed a disdain for the mainstream and its bourgeois concepts of normality. Anything that smacked of "nice" was anathema to them.

This was the Beat Generation, with the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs as their verbal leaders and jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonius Monk as their musical leaders. Some of them were drawn to Denver by Neal Cassady, a street kid, car thief, and master seducer who grew up here. Cassady was brilliant, handsome, and possessed of an insatiable and omnivorous sexual appetite. He became an apostle of free love, of liberation from puritanical restraint, of just doing it. Women and men were both fair game for him, and he enjoyed them all, declaring, "The worst sex I ever had was great!"

He chronicled his exploits in endless raps and long letters that inspired the shyer Kerouac and Ginsberg to throw off their restrictive upbringings and express their full personalities, both sexually and artistically.

The Beats created an art of the moment, of spontaneous expression of feelings, of nonstop, nonjudgmental enthusiasm for life. Through their lives and works, they helped to summon back the Dionysian spirit that had been forced down into the subconscious of our culture.

The Greek god Dionysus personifies ecstasy, impulsiveness, surging life energy that demands free release. When he has sole reign, anarchy ensues. But when he is banished, as under puritanism, the joy and creativity wither in the human spirit. Dionysus' return from exile was spurred by the Beats, broke into the mainstream with the Hippies, burgeoned out with the sexual revolution, and is still going on. This memoir of our forbidden love will take it the inevitable next step further.

A credo of the Beats was movement, as expressed by Cassady's mantra, "Go!" They were travelers, ever restless, shunning the stay-put, routine, settled life. Dowdy Denver turned out to be a handy stopping off place on their journeys along the great triangle of New York-California-Mexico City. All these factors combined to give Denver an itinerant bohemian subculture, small but vital.

The Beats attracted Diana, who was the rebellious daughter of a conservative banker. She rejected the material comfort and emotional sterility of her family, and instead sought out this new wild breed. Rather than becoming a debutante like her mother, she became a teenybopper beatnik, hanging out in the coffee houses and jazz clubs that made up the Denver underground. She imbibed be-bop, free verse, action paintings, and philosophers of protest such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Wilhelm Reich. She wore her hair long and let it grow under her arms, European style. She was cute, sassy, and uninhibited, so attracted many men. She had brief flings with Cassady and alto-sax man Sonny Stitt before taking up with Jacquot Funk, a self-named anarchist poet and importer of Mexican herbs.