stop, he kept reassuring me it would be okay. Though I liked feeling his finger inside me, what I didn’t expect was how quickly his finger became his erect penis. It was inside me before I could push him off and tell him to stop. It just happened. He penetrated me, and in a minute was finished. I am not sure if he pulled out. I was too embarrassed to check. I was too embarrassed to say anything. Did he think I had ever done this before?
We got dressed and walked silently back to the others. When we were walking home, the girls asked me if I liked him. They could probably read my expression. I must have looked different, but they didn’t ask and I didn’t say anything. I did see the boy at the A Be & See Head Shop after that, but we never had sex again.
I wanted to tell my mother about what had happened, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The last time she talked to me about birth control, it was humiliating, and this seemed even worse. I didn’t know how to talk to her about it—it would be too awkward. The truth was, the idea of sex scared me, even though my body told me otherwise, especially when I was high. And now that I’d had it, it was clear to me I still wasn’t ready. What I’d really craved that day was for someone to kiss and hold me, but instead I felt used and ashamed. I was also worried I was pregnant. I’d heard you couldn’t get pregnant the first time, but I was too scared to ask anybody, so I worried in silence until I got my period. I was so relieved I swore I wouldn’t have sex again until it was with someone special and we were in love.
My resolve didn’t last very long. Later that summer I changed my mind, only this time I knew what was happening. That other person inside of me emerged, the one that had followed Kim Fowley around until he had no choice but to notice me, and that person knew there had to be more to sex than what I’d done under the pier.
It started when I noticed a guy named Kenneth around Venice Beach. Venice was a place where ideas flourished. Hippies flocked there every day to sell their wares, show off their music, or try to influence the masses. Kenneth had set up an event from late July until early August for people to come together to pick up trash on the beach. The idea was to promote environmentalism and ecology. Of course I went to the event and met Kenneth at the table he set up to hand out pamphlets about stopping pollution. He was at least ten years older than I was, which made him even more appealing. He was handsome and he stood for something. He told anyone who would listen how wrong it was to destroy the earth and how we need to teach children when they are at a very impressionable and important time in their lives. We could use their creativity to raise consciousness about ecology. He was an activist who was doing something good with his time, something practical and not simply self-indulgent. I listened to his pitch about not using plastic and other throwaways and positioned myself so eventually he would notice me. He didn’t notice me at first, but I wasn’t deterred. I started hanging out by his table every day, and eventually he started paying attention.
He started the conversation, but I was actively trying to draw him in. He invited me to walk along the beach and I listened to everything he had to say. I don’t remember if he ever asked me anything. I didn’t really care. I wanted him to kiss me, and he finally did on one of the benches behind a palm tree. He took things slowly, and it was obvious he was experienced. When he French-kissed me, I didn’t feel like I was drowning in tongue. He touched me in places that I didn’t realize were sensitive and spent time doing nothing but kissing me on my neck. He invited me to his house and we eagerly made love.
Smart and sexy, Kenneth made me feel like a woman. There was only one problem: He had a girlfriend, a fact he neglected to tell me until after we had sex. The awful thing was, I didn’t really care. When he invited me to his house when his girlfriend wasn’t there, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. He never asked my age or where I lived; for the first time, it felt like I’d been able to shake my age and just be myself. I just showed up at the beach, and if the coast was clear, we would go to his place and make love. When I was with him, he paid attention to me and made sure the sex was satisfying and affectionate. He didn’t jump out of bed when we were finished to signal it was time for me to leave. We held each other and sometimes even took showers together. It was everything my first experience was not.
Kenneth opened my eyes up to what sex could be like—and the fact that an older man had educated me was not lost on me. Now that I’d been with a man, a part of me knew I was going to find it hard to be satisfied with boys my own age. Whether my assessment was accurate or not, I felt that I was now officially a part of the sexual revolution I’d been witnessing around me for the last several months. I might not have had a place in my parents’ counterculture, but at least I knew how to have sex.
He and I saw each other every so often for the next few weeks, but it was probably because I was following him around like a puppy. I am not sure he would have pursued me if I had not made myself so available to him. Not surprisingly, things between us ended without much fanfare. The time for my family’s departure was coming closer, and though I kept hinting to him about it, he never said anything. Then I stopped seeing him at his usual place. I looked around for him but was careful not to ask anyone, since I didn’t want him to be mad at me if his girlfriend found out.
When my parents told me to pack for the move, I finally gave up looking for him.
As our family prepared to hit the road, I decided to make the best of what was left of the summer and my remaining time with my friends. We went to the beach, shopped, and hung out on the strip whenever we could. The strip was a place where things were happening musically, but we couldn’t get into most of the clubs, so we just wandered around watching the boys watching the girls, who were watching them back.
It was all fun, but little could distract me from the reality that I was leaving this life behind. I worried incessantly about the bread truck becoming our movable house. No more bedroom, no more neighborhood, no more buying Twinkies at the liquor store or visiting the corner A&W with my friends. Any way I looked at it, there was something that didn’t feel right about this decision to leave our lives behind. My uneasiness only grew when my father showed me where all my stuff was supposed to fit in the bread truck.
“That’s all the room you get, so use it wisely,” he said.
Much like our failed attempt to drive to California in the trailer, he told us to select only our most important belongings to take with us—the rest would go to a huge yard sale. Most everything we had went into the sale, including my sewing machine, which would never fit in my storage space. One by one I put my books, most of my clothing, old magazines, and even records on the folding tables and tarps my parents set out on the front lawn. I stuffed some clothes and my favorite orange bikini into my knapsack along with some underwear and a skirt.
When we had almost emptied the room, I grabbed the brown envelope of my photographs from under the mattress and hid them at the bottom of a box of fabric and embroidery thread I was taking with me. Then my mother gave me another box to sort out. It had my Barbie and Ken dolls with the bed my father made for them.
“We won’t have room for all that,” my father said as he passed by my room. Only the essentials. I reluctantly handed these remnants of my childhood to my mother and never saw them again.
Once everything was packed, we stocked the converted bread truck with food items and extra blankets. The last things to go in were our new sleeping bags and camping gear. That purchase was to be a consolation for the loss of everything else. The next morning when we were about to say goodbye to our home, Danny caught some hippie running down the street with his new sleeping bag. Even when we’d had the entire Oracle commune living in our house, no one had ever tried to steal anything from us. It seemed an auspicious start to our adventure.
As we stared at all of our stuff packed into the back of a bread truck, the real meaning of the phrase dropping out hit home. It is easy through a contemporary lens to assume that the people who dropped out back then were thrill seekers. In spite of their questionable decisions, my parents didn’t do things just