She was at a low point in self-esteem. She felt unworthy of anything good happening to her. One night, as she wandered around the streets of a small ocean side town lost, she ran into him quite by accident. He was riding his bike home and took the time to stop, be nice, and direct her to the appropriate part of town. He invited her to smoke a joint.
She wasn’t expecting anything, but she would easily fall into bed with any available functioning male. So, when he told her she was beautiful, had a nice ass, and how good her pussy was… Well, she just fell for it and he became the father of her children or “the sperm contributor” as she liked to call him in later years.
He wasn’t much to look at himself… Tall, 6’3″, long red hair parted on the side which he flipped nervously behind each ear in turn. He had small, but brilliantly colored blue eyes fringed with almost invisible blondish-red hairs. He had broad shoulders and told her that he worked at the local Cheap Gas station in town.
Although he didn’t much care for work in general, he felt that it was a necessity. “Rent, food, and dope are the three priorities,” he liked to say. “Everything else is extra.” But since he was one of “the original Hippies” in San Francisco at the height of The Haight, jobs didn’t last long. Once the rent was paid, the dope was purchased, and the cupboards were filled with good solid foods like: cheese and beans, coffee and licorice drops, crackers and bread – the job suddenly became unimportant in the haze of smoke surrounding his head.
He wore odd garments some of which he sewed himself: pink, purple, and lavender drawstring bell bottoms, cotton boxer shorts with the typical patterns you’d find at JC Penney’s, a tie-dyed shirt over a white wife beater, thin nylon socks with orange and navy blue high-heeled oxford steppers. He might wear a brown leather cowboy hat and a corduroy jacket on colder days. He always made sure he carried enough money in his pocket for a cup of coffee at the local hang-out where he liked to listen to rock songs of the age, talk politics with his cronies, and play chess or Backgammon.
He had done a stint in the Arizona State Prison for armed robbery – a foolish youthful prank for which he served five years. At the end of it, he left Arizona for San Francisco where he took an active role in packaging and selling weed and LSD. After that, no one could say that they had ever seen him straight again. He always carried two or three hand rolled joints in his front shirt pocket.
He was an intriguing character – a stoned Hippie, Country Joe, mixed with a ghetto-like pimp. An interesting amusement, but not someone you’d take seriously or plan to stay with. As a child he had suffered a lot of unfortunate attention for being a little mischievous and a little slow on the uptake academically.
He was red haired, fair skinned and freckled with enormous buck teeth that could be construed as charming on some counts. He incessantly chewed on parts of his beard, thereby unintentionally keeping it trim. He had chronic stomach problems – an ulcer that often caused him to vomit after eating, but suspicions were that he was bulimic or anorexic since he was extremely thin.
These affects made him quite undesirable as a long-term mate, but by the time her depression began to clear and her self-worth improve, she was pregnant and they began living in a tent on some property friends owned up the coast. Two moves and a year later, she was pregnant again with a second child.
(First published 6/18/11)
