1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  How could we not love Biarritz? It was a love meant to last. With warm hearts we meandered through town to the border and into Spain, San Sebastian, where tapas were invented, where we stopped at the first bar to find the counter lined with big, fat sardines, little cups of olives, fried squids, salamis, crackers, peppers, the works, for a penny a round. I was set, but John didn’t like that weird shit, and Bruno was itching for something a bit more third world, where less money could generate more volume.

  So we rode down to the beach promenade, because Bruno knew San Sebastian. He told us to park and wait. Then he waited while we found our money and gave him some, not too much, about three dollars. John looked wary. I felt the same, but Bruno shrugged and shook his head, like we were fucked up for thinking that, but if we wanted to choose an outlook on the negative side of potential rather than on a friendship secured, that would be our doing, not his, and he left.

  He came back in ten minutes with four baguettes, a pound of cheese, a few bottles of wine—at seven cents (7¢) each—another can of sauerkraut and a few pounds of lunch meat. Oh, and some sugar sprinkled donut holes for dessert. He still had last night’s jar of mustard in his pack, hardly half empty. Oh, and he had a guy in tow who he met at the market—not to worry; the guy had chipped in a dollar. The guy was David Rayall, my college classmate, the friend I’d left home with long ago. It was like that back then.

  Bruno spread the stuff out on a bench, on the wrapping paper it came in, and then dove in, building a sandwich that could gag a horse. As we came to learn, the horse comprising the lunchmeat may have gagged on just such a sandwich. But while we with $5 a day and whatever else we might need in case of emergency hung back, he of the caput fortunes ate with a vengeance. Bruno drank wine from the bottle like it was milk, glug, glug, glug, and in mere minutes he was more satisfied and happier than he’d been in the two days I’d known him. We got a big room in a cheap hotel and lay around drinking wine and smoking opium.

  We left the next morning for Madrid, dropping David at the train station and heading into the Pyrenees foothills, low-rolling scrub mostly, arid and empty but startling and beautiful too, except for the Guardia Seville—the Spanish police—who were equally arid and empty, low-rolling scrubs on their one-cylinder scooters that couldn’t begin to keep up, resulting in a bunch of gun-toting fascists even more pissed off than usual with the Yankee boys on faster bikes. We got pulled over for a document check and explained to them, “No speaka too gooda de Espagñol. Parlez vous humma humma?” Then we turned it over to Bruno, who nodded obsequiously many times on cue and got us out of there in a few minutes, assuring us later that we were on our way to a solid fucking without him. Then he asked if it was his turn to drive yet.

  We’d already smoked most of the opium and ditched the rest after meeting the Guardia Seville. Those were the last years of Franco, and nobody called him Uncle Franco. The difference between him and Stalin was the political spectrum between them—they butted heads at opposite ends, making them more similar than different. They both ruled by oppression with a heavy hand. Madrid was all new and old, an exotic city with open markets and strange things to eat for pennies. We enjoyed it for a day and headed out, because adventurers yearn for the open road, where things are more likely to happen. Besides, John Levy was from LA, where the latest, hippest, grooviest stuff broke first, and he had it on good sources that the real happening was only a week away in Pamplona, where the bulls would run for seven days, beginning at seven a.m. on the seventh day of the seventh month.

  David had acquiesced to take the train to Madrid and join us for that tour but then announced that he would head to Florence, because he came for art, not cows, and we would meet up bye and bye, maybe. Bruno murmured that he loved art and could show David the best art museums and the best Italian home cooking from his mother too, if only David would lend him the paltry few lira for a ticket to Rome, where they should surely stop on the way to Florence. Bruno hadn’t been home for a year and felt that it was time. David agreed, sensing intuitively that Bruno was an artistic person with a big heart and a giving nature, after all.

  A unique characteristic of those days, or maybe of any days for people of a certain age, was our range of emotion. On one extreme was the overwhelming loneliness of my first night in the world with no friends or family. I remember the crushing sensation of cold potential, of death with nobody knowing or caring. The potential for life with no meaning, for that matter, seemed as frightening. Those feelings seem unfounded but may have been necessary to a wild boy raised softly in the suburbs.

  On the other hand, parting ways with David and Bruno was casual as another slice of toast. We didn’t review the good times, the high miles, the horsemeat sandwiches quelling our starvation, the big hotel room on the top floor where we smoked opium and drank another ninety-eight cents worth of Spanish wine, the random meetings, the adventure and youth that would be long gone all too soon. Sharing those golden memories would have required perspective in the moment. We had none, whether from smoking too much dope or drinking too much wine, or amping too much youth like no tomorrow or remaining blind to all but tomorrow’s potential. It was over and out, so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good-bye.

  See you on the corner, maybe, or maybe never.

  Deep Penetration

  SO YOUNG, SO open and alive, so free of regret and inured to loss. Ah, well, it was down to John Levy, LA photog, and me, back out on the rolling foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains, born to the saddle and bound for horizons. From side roads and on-ramps like tributaries to the greater flow, the boomer brotherhood rounding Europe on two wheels joined our cavalcade for a few miles or many. Most headed to Pamplona, some just up from Marrakech, a hotspot that summer where three bucks could buy a matchbox of kief—a blond, loose, fiber derived from cannabis but not marijuana and not hash. It’s really the best was the word on the road, but then anything new or different gets to be really the best for a while. Rolling into Pamplona ten or fifteen motorcycles pulled over as if organized to share a few bowls and compare coordinates on who’d been where and seen what, while comparing kief from East Marrakech to kief from farther south.

  This was the height of it, when all men were brothers and women too. We knew each other immediately by the bell-bottoms, beads, headbands, vests, tie-die, peace symbols, stoner halos and hair. The hair was straight, curly, kinky or ratty and all long. We didn’t wear helmets. Hats weren’t popular for another ten years or so, and long hair gets windswept into wings. We pointed and laughed: what a goof. We passed pipes with universal understanding and no explanation required, because we were in it together, loving the common adventure. Word was out, that it was happening at the campground four miles farther from the far side of town.

  John and I stopped at a roadside café for breakfast. Huevos con tomates sounded disgusting but tasted delectable, as the waitress assured it would. A black-haired, dark-eyed beauty of eighteen, she didn’t hide her favor for the stick-thin Americano in tight pants on a thundering moto with wanderlust in his eyes. She was Marisol and agreed in broken Spanish and English to meet by the creek at five. What creek? The one by the campground. A cinco horas. “Fife. Hat fife ho’clock.”

  So the world unfolded, its lovely petals and scents, colors and textures revealing wanton youth with no plan, no duty, no schedule, no rule, no reverence except to the gods of fun and high times—nada but a future of lusty potential, freedom in movement, beauty and motorcycles. Just look around and see what you like, then try as you might to use it up. You could go all night and have a lifetime left at sunrise. So what should you do? Pace yourself?

  This imagery may suggest heavy action, but it more accurately recalls a period of rough transition for a boy who had yet to learn what is expected of a man.

  The campground outside Pamplona was another rolling pastureland, grassy with shade trees and a baño. The tent campers were sectioned over there, just beyond the van campers. The motorcycles were backed to a hogwire fence so w
e could roll out our sleeping bags right beside our scooters—our salvation—and sleep the restful, soulful sleep of youth fulfilled, which we did till eleven or noon, not to worry; we could cop a couple hours more at siesta. If you picture a perfect setting in a faraway place and a long lost time with campers of every stripe and color convening in a single spirit of life and light, then that was it. The bulls wouldn’t run for six more days, glorious days of idling away the hours, trading adventures and road yarns, smoking kief and drinking wine—oh, and meeting a certain señorita by the creek.

  Dark and mysteriously lovely as an exotic woman could be, Marisol taught the universal language with unforeseen fluency, yet it remained ethereal, on the breeze, understood as a love everlasting but without real-world consummation. Yes, it had the scent, touch and potential of romance. We held hands. She murmured sweet nothings. She may have referenced love or eternity or maybe humility in requesting assistance and guidance as only a man can provide on this sensitive issue.

  I watched her. She watched me back. I averted my glance while imagining her naked so that I would neither frighten nor offend. She seemed perplexed. I smiled. We held hands. We kissed. She tasted of paella and eggs but remained very nearly perfect.

  The campground filled with adventurers seeking bulls. Two high-spirited women pulled right in front of the motorcycles in a VW camper—the place was packed by then, and new arrivals pitched or parked in any space available. Jane, the driver, soon demonstrated that her revolutionary spirit had in no way been dampened by a multi-million dollar trust fund. John introduced himself as a photographer from LA. Small world—Jane was from LA too. Then they compared impressions of the European landscape, certain segments of which resembled those hallowed grounds of the California coast, like Mendocino, Big Sur, Pismo, and on down the Pacific Coast to Ventura Highway, where a Californian could hook a thumb in any direction and catch a ride, including up to the Cosmos and as far out as you cared to go. John and Jane got it on. Why wouldn’t they? Two carefree souls in a carefree time that valued freedom and anarchy over all else—mix that with vigor, stamina, peak hormonal output and five more days till the bulls would run, and what do you get? Boom shacka lacka, to put it mildly. John and Jane seemed made for each other, a perfect match with all variables optimally met.

  Jane’s travel companion Rianne was less gregarious, which is not to say circumspect or reserved or even reflective. She seemed merely more self-contained, observant and cautious, perhaps driven inward or even made defensive by so many bulging eyeballs scanning her perfectly curved torso and svelte Levis to boot. Rianne hailed from Oregon, which may have factored in her softer demeanor, though Billy and Chas also hailed from Oregon, arriving soon after and camping nearby, where they whooped and hollered all night long, allowing a sleepless camper time to reflect on a little Spanish nightingale.

  Maybe Marisol tired of the vibration with sparse verbal support and no physical backup, or she had to work double shifts, or she got grounded or a better offer. Maybe she resented our tedious whiles by the creek, with its rocky bed and none of the high times the Yankees were known for. I could only speculate. The only thing worse than making a move too soon was making no move at all. She stopped coming by.

  Cold turkey is tough on young blood. As a draft-dodging campus refugee who could maintain a C- average by showing up for the first day of class and again for the final exam I felt qualified to be President of the United States of America—or would feel so qualified in another forty years.

  Short of all things to all people in the 60s, I was just clever enough to survive on recreational drugs and crummy jobs, like picking apples or black walnuts, washing dishes and prepping pizzas, shingling roofs or any manner of minimum wage drudgery to pay the rent and buy groceries. A draft beer was 25¢. My share of the rent was $35. Reefer came in lids for $8, though the best Mexican reefer was $15, because it let you laugh for no good reason. Could I have excelled as an A-student if I’d applied myself? No. I could not. A-students are satisfied with sedentary pursuits, like studying.

  I got a D in Español. I remembered a few nouns and transitive verbs, along with a profile of rightwing/Catholic propriety in a severely constrained culture preoccupied with chaperones to safeguard its young and presumably virgin beauties. Maybe my dark-eyed chiquita had murmured about rearranging the furniture in her parents’ house once we were married. Maybe she’d asked for my preference on sexual favors. I told myself to regret nothing, even as hope faded. Yet I feared the fault was in me. I’d held back.

  Next in the stepping-stones to insight came Rianne, who asked for a ride on my motorcycle with only four days till the bulls would run. “Okay,” I shrugged, thinking immediately that a ride would give us a great opportunity to find a bathroom or at least a place to go peepee or even take a dump in a pinch—I could not think of Rianne in that way, possibly doubting that she actually took dumps or did anything outside the realm of perfection. At any rate the campground toilets had clogged and overflowed, illustrating the ultimate case against anarchy. World population in 1969 was right at half of what it would be forty years later, so clogged campground toilets also illustrated the ultimate case for family planning—a case that obviously failed. But nature didn’t begin to die in earnest for another decade or two, so the seeping sewage swelling from a rivulet to a creek to step over was a joke, a bad one worth remembering. Should I take a roll of toilet paper? Nah. She’d bring that if she needed too, and at that point I wondered if she saw me only as a convenient means to a convenient place to take a dump, which of course she must do, even if I had trouble picturing it.

  One toilet still functioned, but it had a waiting line that did not shorten till way after dark, and the area smelled like shit all the time. Rianne wanted to go to a yonder hill. She pointed just there, where she could see a building. She wanted to check it out. It sounded perfect; buildings have bathrooms. Maybe she thought I was checking her out as I scanned her fore and aft for a roll discreetly tucked.

  Never mind. Many girls wanted to go for a motorcycle ride. Not all of them could, but Rianne could. We roamed the countryside looking for the right road to the hillside yonder and finally cruised along the base. The building turned out to be an abandoned church sitting near the hilltop that was otherwise plush green with grass billowing in the breeze. After exploring the old church she said, “This is nice” her first words since arriving. Then she found a place in the soft undulation to lie down with a sigh, arms and legs spread in an attitude of release with no inhibition. Rianne was so beautiful I couldn’t speak, and hailing from Oregon, which is right on top of California, she was cool. She knew about cool things and places. What could a Hoosier possibly say to a cool beauty? Corn looks good this year? How ‘bout them soybeans? Nah. She didn’t care about Midwestern stuff. So I played it cool, saying nothing, trying not to stare and failing, wondering if I would ever find the elusive, mysterious key to understanding females.

  She unbuttoned her shirt to take in more rays. I watched, chewing on a piece of grass in the sun . . . shine. I pondered the move but realized her shrewd defense—saw it clearly to my own disadvantage. The only move was to crawl over on all fours, and a guy couldn’t very well do that, I thought; it would be so . . . so obvious and deliberate and . . . and . . . And it didn’t make much sense to talk about current events or music or school or anything.

  When she sat up to peel her blouse for even better rays, I gave up on trying not to stare. I knew that direct confrontation with the holy countenance would trigger regrettable behavior, and I was stuck, never having spoken to a woman with bare breasts on a grassy hill in daylight. I hadn’t spoken to that many bare breasts at all.

  With decades of hindsight, all fours or a belly crawl would have done to a T. Or a whistle or a blink. Or a how-do-you-do or a cock-a-doodle-do or a pulse, any pulse. Talk about nothing to lose. Maybe she’d have had nothing to say. Or maybe she was the one, as in one and only, which seems doubtful, but a boy feared rejection and accusation in
the presence of a woman. Fuck, man, what were you thinking? What if she wound up with a round house right to the chin and knocked your fucking lights out? So what? How many hundreds of regrets could have been avoided on that lovely punch? But a young man didn’t want to step over the line, even then with love all around us.

  After a long while I said it was time to go. Actually, I had to go. She said yeah, maybe it is, sitting up and turning away more discreetly to put her blouse back on, behaving like the young deb I’d required her to be. I’d blown it. We stopped on the way back at a gas station with a bathroom. What a relief and my only consolation.

  That night Rianne howled from the back of Jane’s van as Chas pumped the jam for old Oregon.

  The next morning at sunrise Billy said, “Man, Chas never got so fucked in his life. Man, I never seen a woman so horny. I think I might get some of that tonight myself.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Call it a long jump from one stepping-stone to the next. At least more stepping-stones seemed likely, though the señorita and Oregon were among the sorriest missteps in life to date. I thought I’d learned my lesson, and that night went for a walk with a nurse from Canada, a uniquely shaped person with slight swayback leading to a big, firm ass that would have tilted her back except for the admirable counterbalance of her front. Frilly spit curls in sandy brown surrounded her round face and round features, rounding out her easy laughter and great good cheer for the times we lived in. Enjoying life and her summer trip, she was having fun and feeling grateful for the world around as it was, even with its ups and downs and roundabouts, because it stretched before us with so much lovely potential and so many wonderful adventures. Simply spherically happy, she took my hand and held it to connect us in the joy we shared. The night was so beautiful, she said, and we were so young and alive. She turned to face me and took my other hand as if to complete the circuit. She asked me if I had any idea of how rare, unique and unbelievably rich was the time we shared.