Acid Blue

Like countless American young people in 1967, I dreamed of running away to Haight-Ashbury to become a hippie. The pictures I saw in magazines and newspapers tempted me with scenes of naked dancing, communal living, mind-expanding drug parties and flowers, flowers everywhere. To a girl from south Georgia, where our Saturday nights were spent cruising the courthouse square and flirting with boys on the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, it seemed like the most beautiful and exotic place on earth. What I found when I actually got there was a little disappointing.

After three weeks in San Francisco, all my graduation money was gone and my friend Debra, who had given me a ride out in her ‘62 Rambler, had departed for Los Angeles to be a movie star, which was the other dream of every young person in America. A few soup kitchens in the neighborhood tried to feed the teeming masses of flower children, who, like me, had come here for the Summer of Love completely unprepared. I was living on the street, sleeping in parks and stairwells at night and panhandling change by day. That’s where I met Dave.

I was standing outside a phone booth, fishing in the bottom of my faded denim satchel for a dime to call home when I heard a male voice behind me.

“You want to come to a party?” I ignored him for a few seconds, intent on the bottom of my bag. You learned in the Haight to play it cool. Being too eager could get you labeled as a newbie, or something worse. I’d seen it happen to kids who finally made their deal with whatever devil could promise them a hot bath and a proper bed. So far I had managed to avoid selling my body, but all around me I saw boys and girls who were caught up in the game.

“I won’t bite”, said the voice. “Just thought you might want to groove a little.” He had a slight Southern drawl that made me instantly homesick. Curious now, I turned to face him.

Ash blonde curls framed his angular face and fell to his shoulders. Broad shoulders. Hard to tell too what else was under the brown poncho he wore, but he was tall, maybe six feet, and his eyes were the clear blue of a Renaissance cherub. He was smiling at me and holding out a piece of paper.

“What’s this?”, I asked, noting that his bare feet were dirty under the hem of his bellbottom jeans.

“Flyer from the Avalon”, said the cherub with the dirty feet. “There’s gonna be some bands and stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Acid”, he smiled again. “Ever tripped?”

“Sure”, I lied. Back home we enjoyed our marijuana when we could get it, but LSD was the Boogeyman. No one at my school had done it, but someone’s cousin at the university in Athens tried it and ended up in an asylum for a while. Or so the gossip went.

“My name’s Dave”, said the young man, offering his hand. “I’m an artist.” Sun browned hands, long fingers, the nails much cleaner than I expected, after those feet. He had a soft stubble of blonde beard that didn’t quite connect its way around his jaw line.

“I’m Amber”, I said.

“Like the color!” He seemed pleased at that, and when he smiled this time, I noticed that his teeth were slightly overlapped in front. So hard to notice anything with those blue eyes holding me paralyzed.

“Actually, my mother named me after a character in her favorite book. She thought it was kind of classy.” I had to find out about the accent. “Where are you from?”

“All over”, he said, “But, originally from Mississippi.” Another refugee from the Land of Dixie. He offered me an invitation to hang out at his place, get something to eat, and I accepted. The red brick building was close, an old home with concrete steps leading up to a modest front porch, where a red haired girl in a long calico dress was engaged in conversation with a naked guy holding a guitar. The sounds of the Grateful Dead drifted out to the street from a phonograph somewhere. Boy, I was a long way from home!

“I want to draw you.”

We were finishing off a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and a pitcher of Kool Aid when he said this. The sun was going down outside and the cold fog would roll in soon, sucking the warmth from the cobblestone streets and making the half naked flower children seek shelter like so many stray animals. It was pleasant here in Dave’s room, sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor, candle sputtering from the neck of a Chianti bottle. Patchouli incense curled in wispy strands around a pagoda shaped brass burner and mixed with the last remnants of marijuana we’d just smoked. There was music from another room, Janis Joplin growling the blues. It felt very safe and cozy here, among Dave’s books and easels and unframed canvases, and I agreed to let him sketch me.

He had talent. In twenty minutes he had captured my image perfectly, right down to the delicate embroidery on my peasant blouse and the patches on my denim skirt. Long, straight hair in dark charcoal streaks framed a pale, oval face faintly marked with freckles. The expression was subtle, not quite smiling.

“It’s really good”, I said. “You’re very talented.”

“You’re very beautiful,” he leaned in close to me. His eyelashes were golden in the candlelight. Maybe it was the pot, or my unwillingness to spend another night alone on a hard wooden bench, or the fact that my daily dose of birth control pills was not being put to use, but I gave in to him immediately when he touched his lips to mine.

He pulled me close and his mouth was soft, oh, so soft and faintly scented with peanut butter. I felt myself respond with a tingling sweep of goose bumps as his hands moved from my neck to my breasts. It had been too long since one of my Georgia boys had touched me like this, and I felt the familiar warmth in my crotch begin its mutiny against my brain.

There was no bed, just a mattress on the floor, covered in an old quilt. We wrestled there like Greek Olympians, removing whatever clothing needed to secure a better hold on each other. He was slender and hardened, almost hairless. The body of a Michelangelo statue. I let my tongue trail over his flat, brown nipples and he moaned softly, like a girl.

He undressed me completely, and I searched his face for some hint of approval. There was no clue from those crystal blue eyes as he bent to kiss my stomach, my thighs, the flat planes of my hipbones. When he pressed his mouth to the dark patch between my legs, I shuddered like a ship striking an iceberg. His tongue moved over me and inside me with the same skill his hands had expressed on the sketchpad, creating a new work of art on the living canvas of my body. I felt a storm gather deep inside me as he worked, twisting and powerful as it approached great velocity, bearing me up like a tornado until it seemed I was flying high over a dark plain, wind screaming in my ears. Lost in a vortex of whirling debris my body was pulled and stretched in every direction at once until it seemed the very atoms of my being would disintegrate like a shooting star. When the storm broke, I fell to earth with a cry, my fingers wound in his blonde curls, legs trembling around his shoulders.

Before I had escaped from the fog of my orgasm, he was positioning himself to enter me, the shine of me still covering his face. His cock was huge and smooth as marble, and it bobbed against my pussy impatiently while his mouth covered my own with tender kisses. I splayed my legs wide and guided him in with a gasp, feeling him stretch my body like no one back home had ever done, wanting him to reach my heart with that probing heat. My hands found the hardness of his buttocks and pushed him deeper into me as my legs wrapped around him like a devouring vine.

There were words he whispered as he rocked against me, but I didn’t understand them all. What I understood was his need and mine, two lost souls far from home, wanting to belong to something, to someone, for a while. No history between us to make this something more than what it was. Just the need and the melding of our bodies on this simple mattress and the smell of patchouli reaching me through the electrically charged air while I took him into me like oxygen.

He came in a torrent of squirting warmth that filled me completely and seeped onto the cotton quilt beneath us. Collapsed on top of me, his breath came ragged and hot against my neck. I kissed his slender fingers until he rolled away and sat up beside me. For a moment he seemed to be lost, looking blankly at my naked form as though it were a strange piece of furniture in the sparseness of the room. Then the smile returned and the blue eyes became warm in the half-light.

“We can still make that party at the Avalon.”

The club was dimly lit and filled with smoke from various types of cigarettes, legal and otherwise, when we entered. A strobe light flashed like lightening to the beat of the band onstage, and the crowd of bodies pressed around us was matching the rhythm, grinding and jerking in the stuttering electric glare. Girls with body paint images of butterflies and mushrooms ground themselves against lanky boys with beads and earrings, much like a fertility ritual from the pages of National Geographic.

I could barely hear Dave over the din of electric guitar, but he made me understand that someone in the crowd had acid for sale. Taking me by the hand, he made his way to a hallway in an especially dark corner of the club, where a young man in sunglasses leaned casually against a wall poster of Jimi Hendrix, smoking. Dave leaned in close and made a request, the smoking man produced a small packet, and I saw currency pass from Dave’s hand to his. I still hadn’t admitted my innocence on the subject of LSD, and wondered how bad it could be, just this once.

With his prize in hand, Dave pulled me into the bathroom. The glare of a naked light bulb blinded me momentarily, and then I focused on Dave’s outstretched palm, where two sugar cubes glistened. All my homegrown sensibility surfaced in a collage of images. The public service announcements, the propaganda films I’d sat through in Study Hall, my father’s stern warnings about “those dirty hippies and their sex drugs”, all played in my mind’s eye. But I ignored it all as I saw my hand reach out, almost without my cooperation, and take the cube from the hands of a blue-eyed cherub.

Dave swallowed his immediately, and I bravely followed. It seemed so innocuous, this sweet, grainy bit of communion host. What harm could there be? I wondered how soon I would feel its effects, if I would jump off a rooftop or pull out my own eyeballs. Before I’d had time for any more hindsight, Dave was pulling me back to the dance floor.

We joined the throng of twisting, sweating bodies as the band covered “White Rabbit” with amazing accuracy. Even the girl singing lead captured the hollow resonance of Grace Slick’s vocals, the commanding triplet notes spat out like a tickertape. In a few minutes I was lost in the tribal rhythm, my anxiety carried away on a magic carpet of electric music and colored lights. I let myself be lost in the scene, in the smell of it, the sound of it, the taste of it. There was a taste, sweet and metallic at once, like the last traces of cake batter on a stainless spoon. It was good to be here, part of the crowd, my crowd. Young people disillusioned with our parent’s world , with the government, with the status quo. I was dancing with a beautiful boy whose talented hands could coax a masterpiece from more than just paper and pencil, could render me immobile with his sapphire gaze, could…could…

It seemed that the room shifted suddenly, my vision unable to reconcile the skewed angles I was seeing. It must have shown on my face, because Dave took my hands in his and pulled me off the dance floor to a battered vinyl sofa against the wall. He sat beside me as I began to accept the effects of the acid, the tingling that started in my hands and spread to my chest, like a bird struggling to free itself. It was warm and cozy and powerful and invigorating all at once. I saw blurred images behind everything that moved, like the trailing puffs of smoke in a cartoon chase scene. Lights were alive with colors I’d failed to notice before. This was an entirely new experience, and I found I did not fear it.

When I looked into Dave’s face, his eyes had become dark as his expanding pupils crowded the color from the irises. He positively glowed in the dimness of the room, and his mouth was moving, saying something I could not understand, so I kissed him. The softness of his mouth was unbelievable, and I put my hands behind his head to draw myself fully into the kiss. It seemed his tongue traveled down my throat and caressed me in places impossibly deep. With my eyes closed I saw explosions of color and patterns as the music and the crowd floated away and it was just my lover here with me , this golden idol whose hands had multiplied like a Hindu deity to touch me in six places at once.

I realized he was pulling me up from the sofa, and I followed as he passed through the entrance to the darkened street outside. He pushed me against the wall, hands under my blouse, fingers squeezing my painfully erect nipples as his body pressed against me urgently. He was hard under the faded jeans, his cock struggling against the confines of the brass zipper, and I tried to free it with hands that felt like balloons. He had to help me finally, lifting its tumescence with his own fingers and offering it to me like a delicacy. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk, feeling the gritty concrete mark my flesh. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting my mouth around this beautiful boy’s meaty cock, tasting its saltiness, inhaling its musk, hearing him groan above me.

When he came, it surprised us both with its quickness and intensity. His hands clawed at my shoulders as he pumped a stream of salty cum into my eager mouth, and I swallowed it all as if it was homemade vanilla ice cream. This was a new kind of arousal for me, forgetting all my previous modesty and decorum. I felt savage and alive as my pussy brimmed with juices and pulsed like a beacon. It frustrated me briefly to realize he had finished before I had a chance to ride that magnificent member, but my frustration was replaced by wonder when I realized he was not wilting. The pink mushroom head still pulled against the swollen shaft, a drop of his ice cream cum glistening in the moonlight.

His hands reached to pull me to my feet as his knee forced my legs apart. Lifting the hem of my skirt, he pushed his hardness against the thin fabric of my panties and I gasped. Even through the nylon veil, I felt my clit shudder at his touch, heard myself moan in a voice I did not recognize. He hooked a thumb under the elastic band and coaxed the panties down to my knees. I gyrated and wiggled until they reached my ankles then stepped out of their confines. The night air on my wet labia almost made me come, and I caught my breath and looked into Dave’s shadowed face. He was smiling beatifically, the flush of his orgasm giving new light to his features. I started to speak and he hushed me with another kiss, a brief one this time, before he took my breast in his mouth and suckled like a child. Electricity traveled from my nipple to my throbbing clit as he licked and swirled endless patterns on my soft flesh.

There were people passing nearby, but I felt no shame. I heard the footsteps on the sidewalks, the encouraging comments of a few who were obviously enjoying the effects of their own drug of choice, but it did not take away from my newfound lust. When he entered me, I traveled like a comet across the sky.

I wonder how we must have looked to someone who was not intoxicated – two bodies leaning against a brick wall, my legs widespread, skirt bunched around my waist, his hips pounding against me in the dark. It must have appeared violent and forced, but I was oh, so willing and there was tenderness behind the primitive need. We had connected in a way I would never be able to explain, this beautiful lover and me. Here in the night, far from everything familiar and safe, we had found some salvation in each other, and it healed us like the message of a tent revival.

We made love again when we got back to his room, and then once more in the morning. My thighs were bruised for a week, but my head was clear as crystal.

Dave received his draft notice soon after that, and, unlike most of the boys in the Haight, he reported for duty on schedule. In six weeks I got a letter from him, saying he was shipping out to Viet Nam. I did not hear from him again, and I like to think it was because he lost my address. I hope he made it back to Mississippi, where some family connection remained to anchor him in this turbulent world.

As for me, I eventually found myself back in Georgia, in a world that did its best to stave off the tides of change. But I was changed, and that could not be undone.

I keep the picture in a drawer, that sketch of a young woman in an embroidered peasant blouse and denim skirt. It was drawn by the hands of a cherub with blue eyes, which , I figure, must make it priceless.