The Love Children (6 page)

The church was decorated with statues and embroidered linens and flowers everywhere. It had stained-glass windows and it was beautiful. I'd never been to a mass before. It was pretty long and you had to stay alert to know when to stand up or kneel or sit down. Afterward, we went back to Bishop's house and there was cocoa with whipped cream, then a huge feast, spread out on the dining-room table. A lot of the people who had been at the mass came to the house afterward; it was a big party. There were two maids and a man in a black suit to serve drinks, and there were two Christmas trees, one really tall one in the front parlor and a smaller one in the back parlor, both elaborately decorated. After the midnight supper, the grown-ups stood around drinking, and Sandy had to go home. Her father came for her. Bishop took me up to his parents' room—they had their own living room upstairs, connected to their bedroom, and they had their own television up there, Bishop said, to avoid the arguments the boys always got into over the other two, one in the living room and one in the rec room in the basement. Before Bishop, I'd never known anybody with three television sets. Bishop's older brother had gone out with friends and the younger ones had gone to bed, so we sat up there and he gave me a Christmas present, a little
silver bracelet; it was really beautiful, and I was so embarrassed because all I had for him was that stupid toy car. But he loved it, or he said he did, and hugged me. I kissed him and told him I loved him, and he said he loved me too.

It was a great Christmas, except for the fact that I was dreading what was going to happen when it was over. But then it
was
over. Time is so strange; events approach so slowly and go by so quickly. After Christmas, Dad went back to Vermont and our lives settled down again.

I don't know when
I realized there was another war going on, right here in our own country. I should have known the year John Kennedy was killed, because Medgar Evers was murdered that same year, and white people bombed a church in Birmingham, killing four little girls at Sunday school. I should have remembered how upset Mom got when Malcolm X was killed in 1965. But I didn't read newspapers, not even after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968. It wasn't until Steve explained it all to me that I saw it—all of a sudden, in one glimpse. It all made perfect sense to me then. I'd been seeing it without noticing all my life. I was fifteen by then, old enough to know how white people treated black people. I'd often thought that if I were black, I would be mad as hell at white people. I was pretty mad anyway. I just didn't realize it was a full-fledged war.

Steve went to public school, but through me he became part of our group—well, sort of. Sandy and Bishop really liked him, but there were kids in my school who didn't want to hang out with him. I didn't care about them. Neither did Steve—he had plenty of friends of his own.

We didn't do much. We hung out, we smoked weed, we talked a lot. We shared books and music, and we went to parties, all over the place. Steve had friends everywhere. He had to support himself and soon after New Year's, in 1969, he got a job in
Monaghan's, a little store on Bow Street that sold cigarettes, newspapers, magazines and, it was rumored, drugs. Maybe because of the drugs, he didn't want me to visit him there. He said cops watched the place and it wouldn't be good for me to be associated with it. I worked afternoons myself now, so the only time I could hang out with my friends—unless we cut school—was on weekends. I hardly saw Phoebe anymore. Every time we got together she wanted to shoplift or shop; I didn't want to steal and I couldn't afford to shop all the time, and it got tired. I wondered why she had to shop so much. She didn't need more clothes, I thought; her closets were bursting. So I started to hang out mainly with Steve or with Sandy, Bishop, and Dolores. After we started the gallery, kids showed up there afternoons and weekends, wandering in at odd times. Most of the time, the air mattress in the corner had sheets and blankets folded neatly on it, a sign that Dolores was hiding out there again. Poor Dolores. We just didn't know what to do to help her. We didn't even know what was wrong.

One rainy Saturday Steve and I were alone there. We were sitting against the wall, drinking Coke and smoking and listening to music, when Steve said, “Want to try something weird?”

“Sure.”

He pulled a little plastic bag with something brown in it out of his pocket.

“It looks like chopped-up mushrooms,” I said.

“That's what it is. Magical mushrooms.” He grinned. “Take a handful. Eat them.” He washed them down with Coke. I imitated him, chewing the tasteless things.

“Now just wait.” He fiddled with his big portable radio until he found a station playing the Beatles. You could always find one eventually: the Beatles were constantly on. They were playing “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

We sat close to each other, our legs jiggling in time to the
music, letting the mushrooms settle in. After a little while, I could see the strawberry fields. I was wandering in sunlight, delighted at the tiny red berries nestled in the deep green leaves all around me. All my pores were open to the sun, and I was a cauldron of fire.

“I am fire and air!” I cried. “I have immortal longings in me!”

We were reading
Antony and Cleopatra
in junior English.

“I am open to the universe!” I cried. Steve tried to hush me. He hugged me lightly, told me to calm down.

But I pulled away from him and ran outside. I was burning up. I threw open my coat; I put my face up to the rain and tried to drink it. It was amazing how hard it was to get the drops to fall in your mouth.

“Jess! Jessamin! Stop!” Steve urged from the door. “Suppose a cop sees you!”

I stopped. That remark had penetrated my haze. I turned to him proudly. “I am open to everything!” I announced, holding my wrists out in front of me for the cuffs.

“You idiot.” He laughed and grabbed me. He pulled me back inside and sat me down and sat next to me and kept stroking my forehead and uttering calming words, for a long time.

He said, “No more mushrooms for you,” but after that I clamored to try everything Steve came up with. One time Bishop had some pills—God knows what they were—and I took them; I scrawled for hours in my notebook, poem after poem bubbling up into my head. Sometimes a whole group of us would take something together, and we'd compare visions. Everything looked so weird with the pills, it felt as if you were seeing the very bones of life, the skeleton under the surface. The trees looked like fingers drawn by Van Gogh; my own hand was a continent filled with ships and land and bodies of water. We would lie around in the gallery, everybody offering his or her picture. We were full of love for each other; we were adored babies in the laps of the gods.

Over that winter and spring, we regularly experimented—that's how we thought about it, as experimenting; we saw ourselves as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley. We took mescaline and acid, pills that made you soar. Some people took downers, just to see what they were like; I didn't. We always smoked pot when we had it, and we almost always had it. It was easier to get than alcohol, which stores weren't supposed to sell us, though some kids could get it. Bishop could always get beer and even whiskey from one of his older brothers' friends or even his sister's husband. He could take it out of the family liquor cabinet if he wanted. His family—well, the men in it (and it was mostly men)—believed in drinking. It was the best part of life for them.

But most of us preferred drugs. And until the cops kicked us out of the gallery, what a time we had! We'd lie around on the floor in states of benign passivity. We were experimenting with altered moods, and our experiments made us broader, more tolerant, more generous people. That was what it meant to be part of the new generation; we were each a
love child
.

We thought that we were a miracle generation born to create a new way of seeing and feeling, a different morality. We had the sense that for generations, for eons, maybe, people had thought war was a great thing, killing was heroic, and domination noble. But we knew that killing was awful, domination miserable for dominated and dominator, and war a horror. We were against the Vietnam War, yes, but also all war, all violence, and racism. We were convinced that if the people of the world took drugs instead of alcohol, and preferred peace to war, violence would disappear in a haze of well-being. It filled me with terror to think of Bishop or Steve or any of my friends having to go to the jungles of Vietnam with a gun, to kill or be killed. What mattered was connection: getting in touch with your feelings and with other people, seeing the beauty in other people, loving them. Relatedness.
We were fond of quoting E. M. Forster: “Only connect.” We were incredulous that anyone on earth would deny the truth of our ideas. We spoke in wonder of people who did, the over-thirty or over-forty generation. We couldn't grasp their mentality. I couldn't comprehend the men in the government, Robert McNamara, say, but I also knew that not everybody over thirty agreed with them. My mother was over thirty, but she thought war was used by elites to maintain their power over the rest of us. My father supported the war, but not because he thought war was wonderful. He thought it was inevitable. He bragged about Leightons fighting in all this country's wars—he felt they had sacrificed themselves. But I didn't see him signing up for Vietnam, and Mom said he hadn't wanted to fight in Korea either. Sandy's parents didn't support the war, but Bishop's did. They didn't change their minds even after their second-oldest son was killed in Vietnam.

A lot of people didn't like our ideas. When I look back on those days, I see how naive we were, how simpleminded. People today talk about the sixties as a crazy time; they say we were foolish, deluded, a wasted, drugged-out generation of losers. But our experiments with drugs were part of our sensibility, one aspect of our enlightenment. We were open to discovering our inner being, instead of driving drunk or fighting each other with fists, or metaphorically killing each other on the floor of the stock exchange. We tried on altered states of being, and the truth is, my friends were a sweet bunch of kids who mostly turned into a sweet bunch of adults. We really were the beginning of the brave new world. If you tell that to anybody today, they smirk. But I say it's true.

Of course, some of us got lost along the way.

 

Steve and I often cut school. One day that spring he came over to Barnes and found me in the hall on my way to French class.
He asked if I wanted to cut. I nodded and we darted out a side door just before the bell rang. He'd promised to hang out with his friend Jeffrey, so we walked back to Cambridge High and Latin to get him. Steve would go into the school at the period break to find Jeffrey. We stood across the street having a smoke on the sidewalk while we waited for the period bell. We were in front of the house of some lady who didn't like us (she'd chased us away before), when we saw a squad of police with riot shields and helmets charging down the street. We looked at each other: were they coming for us? Had the lady called the police on us like she'd said she would? And they were coming for us with riot shields? We started to walk quickly, trying not to look like we were running, toward town. But even after we were a hundred yards from the lady's house, the police kept running in our direction, batons in their right hands, shields in their left. They looked absolutely terrifying, like robot medieval knights. We finally stopped dead on the sidewalk, but they went on running past us and into the school. They disappeared, and after a little while kids came running out, white faced. Some were crying. No one we asked seemed to know what was going on. We didn't see Jeffrey.

Steve said, “Let's go get my car. Then we can take off if we need to.” He had earned enough at his job at Monaghan's to buy himself a red-and-white Chevy, a couple of years old but shiny and nice.

We ran toward Bow Street. The car was parked in the lot behind Monaghan's. We got in Steve's car and crouched down in the backseat. We were both panting from running and were very thirsty. Steve jumped out and went in the back door of Monaghan's and came out with some bottles of water and a little bag of weed. We sat on the floor of the backseat and gulped water, then Steve rolled a joint. He licked three little skins, and pressed their edges together to make a big one, then laid the dried-dung-looking tobacco leaves into a crease, spreading it out along the
paper. Dexterously, he curled the paper up into a cylinder, slid in a tiny piece of cardboard, and twisted the end of the paper. He lit it and passed it to me. I inhaled deeply. Oh, it was good.

While he worked, Steve joked about the owner of Monaghan's, Varashimi Agni, who had two daughters named Jolly and Jett. Steve was doubled over laughing about Jolly and Jett, and I was laughing too and told him I knew someone who had a sister named Brie. I said maybe when I grew up and had a daughter I'd call her Cheddar.

He said, “Or Jarlsberg!”

And I said, “Or Bleu!”

He exploded: he had a friend named Blue! At this point, we were both laughing so hard we had to pee, and he ran into Monaghan's again, then I did. I knew we were both laughing off our nervousness from seeing the cops. A vision had flashed through my mind of being arrested by those robots in plastic helmets, booked, lined up against a wall, shot. For a moment, it had seemed possible.

We had another joint and calmed down, and then we started to make out, and I, well, we'd made out before, and I loved Steve, I really loved him, but before that day I hadn't felt quite so, well, something was new, something was squirming inside me, it was like the time I ate the mushroom, I was painfully open, hungrily open, and I let him touch me and I touched him and he came in my hand. He'd never done that before, and I was kind of overwhelmed, it was a little disgusting, I didn't know it'd be like that. I cried out and sat up. And he turned away and wiped himself off and said he was sorry but he couldn't help it. I kissed him and tried to pretend I didn't mind, but I felt a little sick.