California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

The Altamont free concert that the Rolling Stones threw that winter was probably the event of the year. It came together slowly over the preceding ten days or so, aided along by hoi poloi lawyer, Melvin Belli, and various other persons in the rock and roll field.

On that day in early winter you certainly needed a motorcycle to get to this event. The traffic was a monumental jam from about the outskirts of Oakland all the way up towards the Altamont Pass, which is about an hour drive east of Oakland. Stop and go, bumper to bumper. I flew past cars and in between cars. I smiled a lot at the people stuck in traffic. The world was headed out on that day to see the Stones.

Back then I wore paisley bellbottoms, a yellow button-down shirt and a yellow sheepskin vest, and short black boots. I had purplish-tinted aviator glasses and longish flowing blonde hair. I thought I was the shit. A woman in my dance class thought I looked like Mick Jagger.

Now here I was on my way to seeing the REAL Mick Jagger. You could probably not get away with tossing an event like that today. It was just too free-flowing a thing. Parking was basically anywhere you could, by the side of the road. I got in pretty close, parked my cycle, and staked out a decent spot for myself halfway up the hill.

It was still pretty early in the morning, like around eight o'clock or so. I think the concert was supposed to start around noon. I was a bit tuckered out after my previous night's dalliance, so I stretched out on the grass on my blanket and in a few minutes I was gone. Asleep, or passed out, if you prefer that. Either way will do.

I woke up to the sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, as they were known back then. I could have sworn Grace Slick was rasping directly into my ear, it sounded so close. Did she do threesomes? I wondered. Grace sounded like a ballsy kind of girl. No way I could sleep anymore. I looked around and nearly passed out again. The hillside was now packed with a billion people, it seemed. Where did they all come from?

And more to the point, where the hell did they all PARK?

My paranoia about crowds started to get the better of me. I didn't think I could survive this event. Hell, it had barely started, it was a little past noon, and the Stones weren't scheduled to come on until after dark. Already I was feeling whipped. Something said to me that I should go. Go I did.

It was probably good I left. We all know the bad stuff that happened later that night. The rockumentary film "Gimme Shelter" brought it all home to us about a year later. The Stones got the Hells' Angels to serve as bodyguards, and being the bad boys we all knew them to be, they got carried away with their new job title and stabbed some poor slob to death. He had a knife too, I recall, but it was an unfortunate ending. Glad I missed all of that.

Somehow I managed to find my motorcycle in among all the cars parked haphazardly by the side of the I-80. I went home and practically fell into bed, thinking I could sleep for a week, at least.

As far as my couple D and J went, we never did get around to another threesome. It just did not seem to work out time-wise. I developed a school-girl crush on J, but I knew she was not all that inclined to women so I did not push the issue. She was a very sweet, but rather conservative woman. Once I went up to the house and she and I just hung out; I remember she baked some blueberry muffins for me. That was nice.

But I did continue to play with D. He had decided he would rather fuck me that J, who had introduced us.

There was fallout, of course, and not just the concert. My ex lover J was rather pissed when I told her about the threesome. She wanted it to be her, and I had beaten her to it. But it was her suggestion, and she regretted that, no doubt. Since I had met the wife and D, I could have told her the chemistry was not quite there with her.

She and I were pretty much done with each other by now. Looking back on my time with her, I could see that I was vulnerable to being taken for a ride. J seemed to be an early sample of a polyamorous woman, she went out with men and women, and she went out with women even when she was seeing a "regular" woman. When the tables got turned on her though, she didn't like it.

But then, who would?