by Shaw Sander
Gitta nodded rapidly, her eyes big as she smiled into her drink.
Malcolm hopped up to help a busboy with a heavy tray then came back.
“What did I miss?” he asked, grinning. “How was your date with Simon, Al?”
“Where were you hiding him all this time?”
“He called me out the blue, man, I swear, haven’t heard from the guy in five years.”
“Well, he seems to have our Miss Thing here in a state,” Drake cooed. “And what about Jerry? Lord, does anyone name their child Jerry anymore?”
“He’s wonderful,” crowed Gitta, dabbing her lips with the linen napkin. “Everything Kyle wasn’t. He can dance, too!”
I started laughing.
“Simon can’t,” I said. “He told me he doesn’t play basketball, either. I questioned his identity as a black man and he laughed. I told him about being a byke and how they’ve revoked my membership card, that I don’t get the Gay Agenda emails anymore. He was lovely.”
“And he’s single because…?”
Drake was suspicious about a man in his forties still unmarried.
“He’s divorced, like me. Ex-wife was a byke, like me. Has grown kids, like me. Retired from the Marine Corps, way unlike me but he’s actually a pacifist. Works logistics for the city of Enumclaw. Malcolm, Simon is the nicest thing to happen to me in a long time. It’s been a hard couple of months.”
“You’re welcome. Your turn, Gitta,” Malcolm said, reaching his arm across the back of the booth to rest on Drake’s wheelchair.
“Jerry is so nice! He works for King County in the Assessor’s Office, something totally boring that pays really well. He’s divorced, his wife was a crazy pill freak who killed herself ten years ago. He’s finally ready to date again and said he hadn’t found anyone worth dating until he saw me on t.v. and he felt something.”
“I’ll bet he did,” Malcolm laughed, his fingers rubbing together as he smirked at Birgitta. She really was stunning to look at. Any man would feel something, and a lot of women, too.
“Well, I have news, if anyone wants to hear it,” Drake sniffed, pulling himself up in his chair. “Let’s focus on me, shall we?”
We all looked at Drake, fully attentive. He swirled the remains of his Tanqueray and tonic, clinking the ice around.
“I got a teaching job in Greece. Sunny white-washed buildings and uncut hairy Greek men everywhere.”
“What? Drake, that’s wonderful!” I squealed, happy for his turn of fortune. Without Simon as a bright spot, I knew I might have seen this as a blow. I felt blessed to have a balancing counterweight in my favor. First Malcolm, now Drake, but still I saw that sun-sparkling path ahead.
“Wow! Greece. Good for you. Looks pretty in pictures. Now I’ll have a reason to go,” Gitta said.
“When does this happen?” Malcolm asked, skipping anything emotional and heading straight for man-practical, his hand absently grasping the wheelchair handle in unconscious male connection.
“In September. I’ll be healed by then, I think. Oh, I can’t wait!”
He’d been to a shrink and hated it, had no use for 12-step meetings and the complete physical showed no abnormalities. Dew seemed calmer. Six weeks of loafing around without drink or drug while haphazardly looking for a job and watching a lot of movies had given him some free brain space.
The call from Ziller had come at exactly the right moment.
“Mom, I’m moving back to Chicago. I mean, thanks for the care and all but I need to go back to school. I’m still a resident there. I’m still registered. I need to start my life again.”
“All this from one phone call? What did the Mystic Man say?”
Dew smiled at me.
“All he said was ‘Get right back on the golden horse.’”
“That was it?”
“That was it. Smart guy.”
“He hasn’t spoken to anyone in decades. You know that.”
“Yup. Guess he was waiting for the next incarnation. Ta-dah!”
“Well, Mr. Enlightenment, let’s leave ‘shrooms out of the picture from now on. You got George Wilson Ziller to speak once but don’t push it.”
“My family came to town, Al.”
There was weight in Drake’s voice.
“I’ve been disowned, written out of the will, or so I was informed. My distasteful political activities have disgraced the family, etc. As if I asked to be mugged. Honest to Xena, I felt like I was in a Tennessee Williams play. And some of my idiots cousins came along, eight people in all, like an intervention. These people are tilted from inbreeding or something but I swear on Nancy Sinatra’s white plastic go-go boots they have the social skills of mashed potato sandwiches on Wonder bread. If Ghandi had had to hang out with them, he’d have boxed their ears. It was that bad. These people are crazier than a carton of worms! My own flesh and blood. So anyway. I am disowned.”
“Omigod, Drake, that’s awful. Was your father here in town?”
“No, just the bulldyke sister who refuses to come out, the ‘bohemian,’ everyone calls her, and my married sister with her husband and children and cousins. They delivered the news by proclamation. I had to sign the Magna Carta with a quill dipped in my own blood, then they were gone.”
“How do you feel? Are you alright?”
“Honestly? I feel better than I ever have in my life. So I won’t inherit millions. I feel a great weight has been lifted off my back. I’m fully out now and it is just a relief.”
“How’s Cutter’s sound?” Simon asked, the phone wires between us only five miles. The man seemed perfect in every way, including proximity.
“Ideal.”
“Pick you up at six?”
“Perfect.”
Over the course of a few weeks, I found Simon to be generous, cheerful to a goofy fault, peaceful, easy-going and interesting. Working in his favor was also the six-foot-some frame, easy good looks, white teeth and elegant clothes. He said he had given himself one more month to find a partner before giving up, and then he’d seen me on television and knew. Just knew, instantly, I was The One.
At four I’d learned to read by staring at the Fritz Perls poster, one of many on the wall of Fawn Camp, the comfy Sunshine children enclave.
We were Ponies, as we called each other, finding a new word to describe our thread of connection the law didn’t recognize. “He’s my Pony-brother,” we’d say. Yin-brothers shared some genetic material from one parent or another and then there were full Blood-siblings, all of us roaming the enormous nursery. We were corralled in the Fawn Camp’s huge, multi-colored soft fabric womb, free to create, interact and nap.
An Elder would read patiently while we climbed their legs, rode them piggyback, or attacked squirt gun-style in a surprise ambush. The Elders were interchangeable, working on loose schedules that fit their bio-rhythm, some Roosters by nature and others Owls. There was never a time we were bereft of adult supervision, even if the adult was sometimes barely into puberty themselves. Someone slept in the Counselor’s Bed every night, dimming the lamps and telling us a story to quiet everyone down.
We would join the others for meals in the Friendship Lodge then be Pied-piper-ed back to our comfortable warm world, our bellies full of warm vegis, beans and rice or honey-grilled peanut-butter whole wheat sandwiches.
I read all the posters that lined the tubular hallway to the Friendship Lodge…flapping your arms can be flying…if we happen to meet, it’s beautiful…if you love something, set it free…it’ll be a great day when schools get all the money they need…war is not healthy for children and other living things. Under the poems were photos of naked children, arms spread wide in the sun by the seaside, or flowers or butterflies in a Peter Max style, colors swirled in vivid Day-Glo on black backgrounds. The words just spelled themselves out for me long before school began.
I don’t recall ever not reading.
All us children cuddled naked at night under the communal covers, the weight of the huge Hudson Bay blanke
ts holding us firmly in. Our irregular heat source was a small Franklin stove in the corner of the room, so in the cold Midwestern winters we depended on each other for warmth.
I don’t recall ever not touching others.
Our tight little bodies intertwined, flat chests and pink pudenda meeting pokes and tiny testicles. It was simply how we discovered each other. All of us were taught to be kind.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King we had a television in the nursery. The Elders met long into that terrible night, deciding we needed outside exposure to meet the world halfway. As balance for the Huntley-Brinkley Report we got to see cartoons and Ed Sullivan.
The Sunshine Tribe caught societal run-off from every caste. Those who came from wealth had purchased our hundred acres in Indiana, ten miles from the nearest small town. They gathered gardening implements and a few goats and got back to the land. The grown-ups busied themselves with making the world a laid-back paradise.
The black dirt produced Rodale organic vegetables for the Farmer’s Market and local grocery. Goat milk, cheese, and brown fertilized eggs followed, then came the sprouted whole-grain baked goods and organic preserves. What could be bartered, was.
Cash was exchanged with Townies only when necessary so as not to upset cosmic balance and because Townies were a concern. The Sunshine mailbox was regularly loaded with buckshot or bullets clear through. The Elders would send a group of us children out to repaint it, making the new holes into flowers-middles or an open eye in a happy face, meeting hate with sunny vibes.
Townies called us names when we went to barter goods, whispering and pointing or outright calling us out: “Hey, hippie, do you ever wash them clothes?” Any Elder I was ever in town with would stop, smile, walk directly toward the name-caller and shake their hand in introduction, unnerving them completely. The interaction would usually end with begrudging good will but it took a toll.
Us kids alone were a target for Townie kids so we always traveled in groups to soften the blow, learning guerilla theatre tactics from the Elders to ward off the bad ju-ju and include the haters, deflating the situation. We young ones made forays into Chicago to toughen ourselves up, see the rest of the world and then take the South Shore train or hitch-hike home to Sunshine safety, processing what we’d seen.
The Townies never refused our money, though, and had to admit that our products were absolute top notch. Our enterprises grew based on good business and high quality organic commodities. The waterfall and sunshine logo on t-shirts, glass-jar labels, bread bags and vehicles became ubiquitous.
And there were town services we needed, so keeping the peace only made sense. The Sears Catalog outlet, the thrifts stores, the feed and tackle shop, the Co-Op where we bought grain by the truckload, the dentist, the pharmacy all were worldly services we needed. Sunshine dollars became a town staple as well.
The UPS lady was our friend, plied with cookies and free samples to make her regular drive out to our place worthwhile in all kinds of weather. We loved to see her truck come down the winding, long lane under the hundred-year-old oaks and maples, the diesel engine noisily, distinctively UPS. She was our updated Wells Fargo wagon, bearing winter blankets, cloth diapers, bathing suits, parts for the tractor, a horse trough heater, galoshes, chick incubators, a nursing bucket for weaning animals or tools we’d ordered in town at the Sears Catalog Storefront, waiting six to twelve weeks for delivery. Sometimes we’d be surprised by the content, nearly forgotten so long ago had it been ordered.
At each season solstice was a Be-In, or if it was summer, The Big Sun-In, our back acreage sprouting booths, tables, stages and microphones. Sunshine people streamed to our commune from all over the country to celebrate the seasonal shift and trade their necklaces, incense or t-shirts and listen to music in the fields, camping under the Indiana stars. The nursery would swell with children named Guevara, Sparrow, Kennedy, Owsley, Rainbow, Jimi, Karma and Karl. Our toys and bed in Fawn Camp would be shared with new friends.
The Story-tellers, Poets, Historians, Seekers, Diviners and Animal Guides held court in iridescent, starry, American flag or harlequin costumes, imparting Sunshine wisdom to uplift or challenge, waving colored streamers or perpetual water-wheels. Cold metal folding chairs gathered in circles were filled with blue-jeaned and peasant-dressed musicians. Blended into a hypnotic siren call were fat-bottomed striped mandolins, Martin and Guild guitars, hammered and mountain dulcimers, mournful lutes, autoharps, homemade clay ocarinas and bluegrass fiddles with darkened chin-rests. One year The Incredible String Band came to play and I sat at their feet for hours.
I liked the food the best, booths trading or selling honeycomb, fried apples, peppermint tea, hot buttered tortillas, peanut butter cookies, bright red cherry jam on cinnamon flaxseed toast and other seasonal delectables. But mostly I liked it because Cora was there to taste the banana bread or lick the cream-cheese frosting from our shared carrot cake. Children were indulged at festival time so Cora and I ran from booth to booth, eating ourselves sick, holding sticky hands and twirling our embroidered Mexican skirts together.
A lump of lovesickness took over my chest every time my eyes fell on her, my heart not understanding how something so precious to me could hurt so hard inside my ribcage. I wanted to keep her holding my hand, eating sweetmeats at the festival forever, locking our love in time, though I couldn’t tell anyone. It wasn’t Sunshine to want to possess someone tight so I stared at her, my chest aching, bursting with swollen want that engulfed me, hoping with desperation that she would choose me, too. Her knee touching mine under the Be-In picnic table made me unbearably warm.
Cora came from somewhere near Boston, her mom hitch-hiking through with Cora in tow. My heart-wishes came true for the next decade, since Cora’s mother Raven fell in love with Grey Wolf and stayed on. I got Cora as my next-to-me bed partner in our own waterbed, my aching chest giving way to whole body urgency flamed by our nightly kisses.
She became my reason for everything I did. Our budding adolescence was a warm awakening of sensual beauty. Every moment I experienced was drenched in her woody Bakir perfume her mother’d brought from the East Coast.
Our Sapphic devotion was regarded as sweet by the Elders, their philosophy naturally embracing gender-blending. After all, they themselves were falling into bed with anything that moved, their minds and legs open.
Babies came, midwifed underwater to humpback whale sounds in the Mother Hut and little ones were loved by all. Sex with or without reproduction was honored as the Natural Way. Consensual acts of any kind were gently encouraged and forcible violations simply never occurred. Any communicable diseases were taken care of at the Fountain of Wellness Clinic, the supplies donated by our wealthier supporters who couldn’t live the life but wanted to share the peaceful vibe.
The Morning School was bright green inside with a yellow sun mural covering one upper corner, the smiling orb looking benevolently down on us. Chairs, cushions, bay windows and tables were available and we sat anywhere we liked. Classical music on WFMT played quietly behind us every day. Old and young teachers, balanced carefully for optimal understanding, led us toward math, science, writing, reading and other worldly necessities while trying not to squash our independent spirits.
I loved school, especially with Cora next to me, making cat’s cradle yarn patterns between our outstretched thumbs and forefingers.
Sometimes during lessons she’d let me sit behind her and braid her silky long blond hair, the feel of it charging my erotic batteries from head to toe. I would lean forward and smell that wonderful shampoo advertised on Ed Sullivan, the one with Donovan singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven.” Or it might be the new one called Lemon-Up that came in a yellow bottle with a big plastic lemon for a cap, the citrus goodness shining Cora’s blondness to a painfully beautiful luster. I don’t recall ever not loving her.
George Wilson Ziller’s arrival and sad crescendo reverberated throughout the commune, power grabs suddenly primary as the Elders turned
on one another. Ziller’s influence up the chain within national Sunshine itself vibrated everyone at different levels, jarring fissures into the foundation. Voices once calm and easy-going now clashed in angry bursts. Goods became possessions. The urgent need for declarations of ownership followed in everything from kitchen equipment to love relationships.
Things fell apart. The land was put up for sale. Everyone disbanded, hard feelings left simmering. No forwarding directory was kept.
Cora and her Yin-sister left with Raven and Grey Wolf’s older brother Hardy, bound for California. I sobbed brokenhearted as my family pulled us to Chicago, heading for Uptown to work with the poor, my mother’s nursing skills needed at the indigent clinic while her new boyfriend Faustino would translate for patients.
Good-paying social work was hard to find, my mother told us as our world was left behind, so we had to be grateful the Universe had provided “clean” work that still felt connected to the spirit of Sunshine by helping the less fortunate. And there were, after all, five children to feed: my elder Yin-brother RayRay, me, my twin little Blood-sisters Summer and Rain, and our deaf Pony brother Joey, whom no one had claimed in the disbursement.
Wrenched apart from the love of my so-far life, I felt nothing but despair as the Sunshine homestead splintered into dust, shadows and memory.
I took Illinois state tests and placed off the charts. Awarded a high school diploma in the mail, I soon learned to carry it in my pocket to ward off truant officers. At fourteen I spent my days wandering the streets of Uptown, watching Superfly daddies work the women in full-length pimp coats and platform shoes, long-haired Jesus freaks peddling their full-color rag“The Cornerstone,” panhandling junkies, hippies selling the underground paper “The Seed,” busking musicians with open velvet-lined guitar cases, Children of David weirdoes pushing printed pamphlets of philosophy as mad as a Dr. Bronner’s soap label, amputees rotting in broken wheelchairs parked in the sun, schizophrenics raving on the street.