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Table of
Contents
Individual Romance
1 Dahlia 1
2 Home 7
3 Group Wedding Portrait 16
4 The Van man's hope as electron in a circuit 30
5 The Love Poem 41
6 Porpoises at the Drip-Dry Lounge 49
7 Zapped 57
8 The Strawboss of Skillful Means 62
9 A Night to Remember 85
10 Love Torqued on His Thoughts 107
11 Nuclear Dread Oroborous Transcending 118
Group Mind
12 Kalachakra Initiation and the Dakini 139
13 Diary of a Commune Nympho 146
14 Tantric Sex Secrets 157
15 Tara the Bodhisatva of Compassion Rising 170
16 Group Shower Authority 179
17 The Husbands of Acid House 183
18 The Ineluctable Reluctance of Permeability 192
19 Keepers of the Flame 198
20 Make love as if it is the last time 201
21 A Chiascuro of Jealousy Moving 209
22 The Things We Need to Do for Love 214
23 Egodeath 217
24 Jade, Cool as Green Ice 232
25 Memories like Blossoms on a Stream 236
26 First Time Again 242
27 Looming toward a Phantom Love High 246
28 Sisters and Brothers; Wives and Husbands 249
29 The Genius of Love Tries out her new Body 255
30 Feeling 18 when you are Thirtysomething 264
Group Marriage
31 Billy Boy, Wyoming and Bob 273
32 Nimrod 277
33 Wolf Eyes 282
34 A Tibetan Funeral in America 291
35 The Analyst at Work 315
36 Deconstructing Sutra 339
37 Reconstructing Sutra 364
38 Wooing the Wild Tantrika Women 382
39 Night Movie in the Long Body of a Dream 390
40 A Recidivist at the Court of Love 411
41 Thought Forms 413
42 In a San Francisco Bath-House, 1983 416
43 The Unconscious Group 426
44 Ring Around the Rosy 429
45 Stonewalling the Brute 433
46 Trust and the Trans-parent Self 443
47 Mr. Nice Guy 450
48 Book of Matches 455
49 Feeling / Defending 456
50 Like Two Carnivorous Waterbeds 470
51 A Gardener in the City 472
52 Dolores Park 478
1
Dahlia
A
woman sat down beside a man in the only
aisle seat left just seconds before the
house lights dimmed and theater began. As
the play slowly came up, the man Walker,
noticed that the woman had long dark hair
finely falling over her shoulders down the
middle of her back, straight and free.
Walker was not so forward-thinking as to
leave the aisle seat open in hopes of
possibly engaging a woman, although he
certainly wanted to; he was with his
friend Bob, the director of the play who
wanted to be more in the center to better
observe, and Walker was sitting beside
him.
Using
the spy technique of sweeping the eyes
left in a sidelong glance without moving
the head, Walker casually looked at her
face. He was struck by how good-looking
she was. He wondered if she might be
latina. She looked to be in her early 30s,
and lanky. Big shoulders and big hands.
Her face was noble. She had freckles on
her cheeks. She was movie-star beautiful,
except that her eyes had a child's shining
wildness which enlivened this beauty and
lifted it out of being something
unapproachable to being real.
He
turned to take in more of this lovely
brunette. She must have sensed his gaze;
suddenly she turned and their eyes met! He
managed a quick smile of chagrin; she just
looked at him, with her doe eyes
unblinking.
She
saw his large masculine face. He was fair
skinned, had long curly light brown hair.
His face had all the masculine attributes
of good looks, in spite of an adolescence
ravaged by acne. His eyes were as blue as
the sky. A girlfriend had once said he had
Mick Jagger lips. His face was so
masculine looking that early in college he
had been teased about having a "camp" jaw.
They
smiled at each other.
As
Walker settled into his plush chair he
became more and more aware of her
presence. Even though he was intently
interested in the performance as it
progressed on stage, he found himself
being more and more aware of the woman
next to him. The play was An American
Yoga. He noticed how easy her breathing
was.
At
a certain point in the piece, the actor
who was playing a North Beach barker with
greasy slicked back hair and a skinny tie
began making outrageous remarks about muff
divers and fur pie. Some people got up and
left the theater as he cat-called to them
out of his monologue. Walker was delighted
that the woman beside him enjoyed the
sexual humor. A closer look told her age:
she has some lovely laugh lines at the
corner of her eyes. And yet her laughter
was a girl's peel of delight, which just
seemed to bubble up and escape in spite of
the indecorousness of the material.
Several times they shared a
laugh.
At
the intermission, Walker, relieved that
she was by herself, decided to chance a
friendly comment: "It's good, isn't
it?"
"Yeah,"
she agreed. "I don't get out to a lot of
theater, but I wanted to see this
one."
When
she stood up and laid her long-sleeve
girls-school sweater into her seat, Walker
noticed, her trim shape fitting snugly
into cords and the hint of bust hidden in
logger's flannel shirt. She leaned over
toward him and said, "Will you keep an eye
on my sweater for a minute?"
"Yeah,
sure," he said. He sat there, feeling a
little ridiculous being the custodian of
her stuff. I ought to go out into the
lobby and talk to her, he kept telling
himself. When he finally got up the nerve
to go out there, he didn't see her
anywhere among the crowd. He got back to
his seat before she returned.
The
climax of the play was stunning. The actor
moved and writhed in front of a screen
upon which was projected a film that had
been recorded in a camera that had been
thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge on an
elastic bungie cord. The audience gasped
in amazement. The actor dancing against
the moving background of the fall made the
audience feel like they were sliding off
the edge of the continent. It gave one a
sense of being part of a great fall into
oblivion as if one were participating in
some modern rushy high-speed art
sacrifice. The women sitting next to
Walker seemed moved too. They looked at
each other with recognition and
confirmation. He wanted to strike up a
spontaneous conversation with her.
However, he hesitated because of his
extreme shyness, and not wanting to invade
her space. But when Bob said, "Walker,
there's going to be a cast party after the
show," a light bulb went off in Walker's
mind. This would be a good thing to invite
this woman to. He smiled at her, and
began, in a kind of big brotherly way, to
include her into the after-theater glow
whose circle was quickly edging toward
them. The actor on the stage was holding a
bouquet of flowers and was introducing the
director Earnst. The spot light coursed
through the audience and encompassed
Walker and the woman as Earnst stood and
nodded to the crowd. Somewhere in the
timeless movement of thoughts, while
Walker was processing the fear he always
gets before that initial encounter with a
woman, the fear that some look in his face
would put her off, the fear that once
again he would be creamed by rejection, he
noticed the woman had slipped out of her
seat and left! He leaped up, strode
quickly to the lobby of the theatre and
spotted her drinking a glass of wine. He
swallowed his fear with a big gulp and
said, "Why don't you stay for the cast
party. Drink some more wine."
She
tossed her hair with an inviting shake of
her head and a small portion of it fell in
front of her ears. She had an earnest,
almost Madonna-like calm to her face which
became considerably more girlish as she
wiggled her shoulders and then sticking
her tongue between her teeth, smiled and
said, "Okay."
Beer
and Calistoga water had been sent for,
fruit and cheese were laid out.
"What's
your name?" he asked.
"Dahlia."
Walker
worried that his southern accent would
give him away.
"Are
you new in town," she asked.
Walker
hitched himself up trying to make himself
look like an old blues hound and sang in a
gravely voice, the lyrics from a song: "I
just got in from Texas, babe."
She
laughed and told him that she had just
moved from Hawaii. You could see that both
Walker and Dahlia and felt edgy and
uncomfortable amid the gush and swirl of
the actor crowd, the way they so easily
and with florid aplomb hailed each other
and kissed each other on the cheeks and
carried on with great exaggerated
emotional physical encounters. Walker
envied and felt intimidated by their ease
with community. Dahlia wondered about the
authenticity of the thespian salutation.
The man and the woman were alone together
in this crowd.
Walker
generally told her about the theater, the
warehouse scene in Berkeley, keeping the
conversation on Bob Earnst and the theater
ensemble, The Blake St. Hawkeyes.
Occasionally Bob would wander in and out
of their conversation, interjecting
various asides about the theater piece,
being charming. Walker's partying style
(if you could call it that) was to hang
back around the keg, swapping lies with
the good ole boys. Walker was grateful to
watch how Bob put Dahlia at ease. Earnst
had practically invented solo performance,
a new art form in the Bay area, by
incorporating liberal borrowing from
Grotowski, Artaud, tribal ritual, jazz and
tai chi. Dahlia seemed particularly
interested in the theater
collective.
Walker
asked her: "Can I call you
sometime?"
"Well
I guess so."
She
gave him her phone number and he wrote in
on a match book.
After
a particularly long lull in the
conversation when his out of the blue, off
in the blue eyes just seemed to drift off
into space Dahlia picked up on it and
asked Walker, "Where did you go? Where did
you go just then?"
"Sorry,"
he said, drawing himself back, "I was just
worrying about my dog. She's in the car,
down in the parking lot."
"Want
to check on her?" asked Dahlia.
They
let Sunshine the dog, out of the van, and
walked down the jetty at Fort Mason. Whole
oriental families were fishing at night,
listening to disco music, chatting easily.
Off in the distance was a clear view of
Alcatraz. Dahlia, wearing her long-sleeved
school-girl sweater draped over her
shoulders rubbed her forearms, hugging
herself. Though Walker sensed she wanted
to be touched, he did not touch her.
Back
in the theater, they helped strike the
set. Dahlia carried three heavy lights at
once! It was then that he became aware of
her beautiful, straight, broad, brave
shoulders.
Although
she seemed to want to continue partying at
a jazz club called Bajones on Valencia,
Walker was driver to Earnst this night and
they had to get back to Berkeley.
Walker
opened the door and let her into the back
of the van. He felt relieved that Dahlia
was perceptive enough and that he and Bob
were trustworthy enough for her to feel OK
about going with them.
"Well
this is a traveling 'poor man's salon',"
Walker said, indicating the back of the
van. "It's like a nest." The sleeping
compartment was dense with tapestries
covering the windows. Big inviting pillows
were neatly arranged on a big mattress.
"It's a little like Freud's study, don't
you think? Or Sara Bernheard's studio
packed with stuff." While he worried about
what she would think of him if she knew he
lived in his van, she thought about all
the books she had read on Freud and
pictures she had seen of his study. She
wondered what it would be like to make
love on that couch.
Walker
reached back onto the bed / bench and
pushed aside his beloved regulation-Army
down-filled mummy sleeping bag. "In this
bag, I have spent many an hour zipped up
like a sarcophagus, snoozing into a
transcendental dream."
Dahlia
sat on the edge of the bed platform where
she could lean forward and drape her arms
on the front seat. She pointed between the
seats in front to a radio mounted beneath
the dash. "Is that a short
wave?"
"No,
it's a CB," Walker said. "Are you into
CBs? What's yer handle?"
"Oh,
I don't have a handle," she said. "But we
have a short wave at the house where I
live. What's your handle?"
Walker
thought back to the mid 70s when, during a
previous attempt to live in Berkeley, he
worked as a cab driver in Berkeley and
Oakland. He shuddered thinking about all
the pimps in flamboyant clothes and
prostitutes in hot pants he used to pick
up on MacArthur or Telegraph Ave. motels
and ferry about in the night. Whenever he
could he used to go up to the top of the
Berkeley hills and watch the bay.
Listening to Terrible Thing and The Rug
Man. Walker's handle back then had been
Krishna Glass. Boy that was weird. He had
come under the influence of JD Salinger,
and thought of himself, in a literary
sense, as a brother in the Glass family.
"Oh,
I don't have one either," Walker said. "I
just like to have it in case I get stuck
in some place like New Mexico."
Dahlia
gave them directions to her place. Walker
revved the VW bus up to climb the long
Divasadero incline from Fort Mason and as
the road climbed and climbed they began to
see beyond the huge plush mansions to the
neighborhoods of lighted houses following
the contour of the hillsides, stretching
off and circulating around the pristine
skyscrapers of the brightly lighted city.
It was so steep Walker remarked: "Woe! We
might go tumbling backward down the hill
end over end like a football! . . . Has
that ever happened?"
"Nope.
It's never happened," Bob said.
Dahlia
said, slightly defensively, "I only know
the way the busses go."
Walker
steered the oblong Van down impossibly
steep hills. "Man this little van is
climbing halfway to the stars."
She
lived in a huge building that took up the
whole corner of Mission and Army. It had
once been a Sears department store. He
pulled into the parking lot off Valencia
and drove up to where he could be in sight
of its industrial glass door. Walker went
around and slid the van door open to let
her out.
He
walked with her a little ways toward the
door, to be out of site of Ernie so he
could make his move. Walker took her arm
gently and she turned to face
him.
"I'm
glad to meet you," he said. "I hope we can
become friends."
She
smiled at him, and looked hopeful. "Me
too."
He
let his arm slide further up around her
shoulder and pulled her to him. She
yielded to his pressure gracefully,
allowed herself to be pressed close to
him, and indeed, grasping him in turn
hugged him back. Walker felt
glorious.
"I'll
call you soon," he promised.
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