Monday, January 16, 2006
Berkeley, 1968 (Pt.2)
Last time I began writing about my girlie experiences just before I enrolled in classes at the University of California at Berkeley. As I tried to reconstruct what I was doing at the time, I found it useful to center on the women I knew then.
A lot of the women I had sex with were friends with me first. The sex came along and didn't seem to affect our friendship one way or the other.
My friend Lyn was one of these friends. We met at Maud's, the classic San Francisco dyke bar at the time. Lyn was from a well-to-do east bay family. Her father was a psychiatrist who administered the tests for the Oakland Police Department. Her mother was a psychiatric nurse. So, what this meant for Lyn was, her emotional history had some heavy complications, but help was close at hand. A good thing, that, because Lyn had some psychological problems. Problems with affluence. She and I would joke about it all.
When college time arrived, Lyn was sent packing to Sarah Lawrence, one of the "Seven Sister" women's colleges on the east coast. Read as snotty, to you and me.
Lyn would tell me tales of life at Sarah Lawrence. Everyone sounded terribly unsober. Drugs were rampant, alcohol more common than Coca Cola. The girls would go off on weekends to their proms, parties and whatnot and get snookered up their wazoos. There was a kindly old guy who looked after the dorms, she told me. He would round up some guys to help carry the passed out girls out of the prom and into the back of his station wagon. They would stack them neatly in the back, side by side, taking care not to muss their dresses. I can almost see him waving to the guys and driving off saying, "It's never a lady's fault." Or some such cornball line.
Unfortunately Sarah Lawrence came to a screeching halt when Lyn's parents got a late night call from the dean. It seemed Lyn was caught indulging her carnal impulses with another coed one day in the dorm. The door was left unlocked and someone walked in. Surprise surprise. Lyn was expelled. The parents yanked her back to the west coast. Good thing that, it's how I got acquainted with Lyn.
She and I went out to a bar one night, the vibe between us got friendlier, and we were both in between fuck buddies, as it were. We ended up going down on each other back at her apartment. It was nice and intimate, but neither of us expected or even thought about it becoming a "dating" thing. We went back to being friends.
Later, we became roommates for a while, in a house up in the Richmond Annex north of Berkeley. I was in my last semester at Berkeley in the English Department, and Lyn had met Kathy. They decided they wanted to live together, I ended up being their third wheel in the house. It sat atop a hill overlooking the bay, and had a nice fenced yard where we would sunbathe naked and play with our house rabbit. It was positively bucolic.
Kathy was a tall thin drink of water with long blonde hair who worked for the post office. She was laid back and fun and went about her daily grind with a bemused sort of attitude about things. She found me a quaint type with a penchant at the time for Steve McQueen movies. One night we all went out to a strip club, where one dancer seemed quite taken with my presence. She danced her way around the table and did interesting things to my person with her long, trailing scarf.
"Gee, maybe I should start watching Steve McQueen movies too," Kathy quipped.
It was only my second visit at the time to a strip club. The first one was recently that same year, in the company of one of my English professors.
Strip clubs. Bar hopping. Party going. Pool playing. Motorcycle riding. That's about what I remember from that period. My classes were something of a blur. Somehow I managed to graduate.
TO BE CONTINUED
A lot of the women I had sex with were friends with me first. The sex came along and didn't seem to affect our friendship one way or the other.
My friend Lyn was one of these friends. We met at Maud's, the classic San Francisco dyke bar at the time. Lyn was from a well-to-do east bay family. Her father was a psychiatrist who administered the tests for the Oakland Police Department. Her mother was a psychiatric nurse. So, what this meant for Lyn was, her emotional history had some heavy complications, but help was close at hand. A good thing, that, because Lyn had some psychological problems. Problems with affluence. She and I would joke about it all.
When college time arrived, Lyn was sent packing to Sarah Lawrence, one of the "Seven Sister" women's colleges on the east coast. Read as snotty, to you and me.
Lyn would tell me tales of life at Sarah Lawrence. Everyone sounded terribly unsober. Drugs were rampant, alcohol more common than Coca Cola. The girls would go off on weekends to their proms, parties and whatnot and get snookered up their wazoos. There was a kindly old guy who looked after the dorms, she told me. He would round up some guys to help carry the passed out girls out of the prom and into the back of his station wagon. They would stack them neatly in the back, side by side, taking care not to muss their dresses. I can almost see him waving to the guys and driving off saying, "It's never a lady's fault." Or some such cornball line.
Unfortunately Sarah Lawrence came to a screeching halt when Lyn's parents got a late night call from the dean. It seemed Lyn was caught indulging her carnal impulses with another coed one day in the dorm. The door was left unlocked and someone walked in. Surprise surprise. Lyn was expelled. The parents yanked her back to the west coast. Good thing that, it's how I got acquainted with Lyn.
She and I went out to a bar one night, the vibe between us got friendlier, and we were both in between fuck buddies, as it were. We ended up going down on each other back at her apartment. It was nice and intimate, but neither of us expected or even thought about it becoming a "dating" thing. We went back to being friends.
Later, we became roommates for a while, in a house up in the Richmond Annex north of Berkeley. I was in my last semester at Berkeley in the English Department, and Lyn had met Kathy. They decided they wanted to live together, I ended up being their third wheel in the house. It sat atop a hill overlooking the bay, and had a nice fenced yard where we would sunbathe naked and play with our house rabbit. It was positively bucolic.
Kathy was a tall thin drink of water with long blonde hair who worked for the post office. She was laid back and fun and went about her daily grind with a bemused sort of attitude about things. She found me a quaint type with a penchant at the time for Steve McQueen movies. One night we all went out to a strip club, where one dancer seemed quite taken with my presence. She danced her way around the table and did interesting things to my person with her long, trailing scarf.
"Gee, maybe I should start watching Steve McQueen movies too," Kathy quipped.
It was only my second visit at the time to a strip club. The first one was recently that same year, in the company of one of my English professors.
Strip clubs. Bar hopping. Party going. Pool playing. Motorcycle riding. That's about what I remember from that period. My classes were something of a blur. Somehow I managed to graduate.
TO BE CONTINUED
