In the lobby of the movie theater, I hung (invisible) by my cousin, Peggy, watching the boys watch her. I had nothing to do except fidget with my purse and wait for someone to notice me.
“Y’all know my cousin, Sue, don’t you?” she declared proudly.
Peggy’s boys turned. Dutifully, they assessed my figure and face. However, no amount of primping had imparted any shred of sex appeal to me.
“Everyone says she’ll be beautiful someday.” Someday made it sound like I existed only in the future.
The blue darkness of the theater was a kind of war zone. Boys, single and in pairs, hovered and roamed. Young romance imploded. Couples split up and changed partners halfway through the show. Expletives and threats were shouted. Fist fights broke out. Cups, wrappers, popcorn, and ice were tossed around. Paper debris was everywhere.
Peggy assumed a royal seat in the center of the chaos, her favorite suitors on either side. At the far end of the row on the aisle, I sat next to one of the leftovers, a boy marked by ineptitude at sports, a boy who wore glasses.
From a distance, I witnessed their fealty to Peggy. I saw how she had to be gracious. She had to smile and laugh while I wasn’t required to be anything. I was relieved of all feminine duties. I could ignore the commotion, observe without being disturbed, and know I had been spared.
Once Lenox Square was built, no one went downtown to shop. Ding Ho’s (Atlanta’s only Chinese restaurant) and Frohsin’s (an elegant dress shop) were the only two enticements. Sometimes to flaunt our independence, Peggy and I skipped the movies on Saturday afternoon and took the bus from Buckhead into the center of the city.
Much of downtown Atlanta was segregated: restaurants, movie theaters, hotels. But, as we walked farther south, we found blocks where the color line wavered. The throngs of sharply dressed brown men and women made it hard to tell whose city it was.
Our adventures were modest: a grilled cheese sandwich at Woolworth’s, the lingerie department at Davison’s where we fondled nightgowns and slips, the white marble Carnegie Library (a miniature Parthenon) with its permanent tribute to Atlanta’s most famous writer, Margaret Mitchell, and the highlight, a trick and magic shop which was a wedge-shaped room in a wedge-shaped building (I was a big fan of practical jokes, especially invisible ink). It was there our excursion ended unless Peggy could be persuaded to play a game of my own invention.
Peggy was reluctant. She usually made excuses to go home. Unlike me, she was not fascinated by the unknown. Her interests lay in controlling the familiar.
The game began the instant I chose. “Her!” I pointed.
Off we went, steadily following the figure ahead, traveling deeper into downtown, passing pawnshops and bars, surplus stores and resident hotels where wet clothes fluttered in the windows.
The sauntering, mocha-cream giantess was extraordinary. She sported a red beret no bigger than a doily, attached with black bobby pins to a coil of yellow hair. Her jacket was red leather, and her tight skirt had a slit that went above the knee. Under the contour of skirt, her backside jiggled and swung. We watched with fascination.
“No girdle,” Peggy said.
“She’s French,” I told her.
“A slut?” she asked.
“A dancer, look at her legs.” I was already something of an expert on French dancers, having attended a performance of the Folies Bergère on a trip to Europe when I was ten.
“And her name?” Impressed by my omniscience, Peggy inquired.
“Francine, Francine Monet.” I had visited Giverny, too.
Mademoiselle Monet swayed through the crowd, leading us into the plumb center of Atlanta, a point not so much somewhere as nowhere, an empty spot where everything dropped away. When we walked out of this center, the city reformed itself into towers of tall, friendless buildings. Downtown was behind us. We had crossed into the quarter of pool halls, seamy hotels, taverns, and the Greyhound station where legless veterans sold No. 2 pencils.
“I’m not going there,” Peggy cried.
Neither was Francine Monet. She walked on, leading us over a massive number of tracks into the railway terminal. This was another kind of center where people and histories waited and then disappeared.
We took up a position behind two pillars in the waiting room. Above us was the schedule board, times and destinations marked in chalk. Francine Monet checked the board, took a seat, removed a hand mirror from her purse, adjusted her perky beret, and by angling her mirror caught my eye like flint.
“She knows,” I gasped.
“What?” Peggy jumped.
“That we’re here.”
We grabbed each other’s hands, waiting for the next move. Hers, no doubt. We were no longer masters of the game.
She rose and exited the station, and like zombies, we followed her out the huge doors, past the taxi stand to a covered alley, piled high with luggage wagons and rusty boxes.
“Hey, girls!” Francine shouted at us.
“She speaks English,” Peggy said. Even I was surprised.
We stood at the entrance to the alley, ready to run at any moment. She stood a few yards inside.
“Is this what you looking for?”
In one quick motion, she yanked up her skirt. There was neither girdle nor panties but a great deal of something else. Two white striped straps framed a bulge, a knob, a hump. The skirt came down so quickly that later, neither of us could believe what we saw.
Peggy and I bounced backwards. We raced past the station into downtown. Towers, movie palaces, department stores flashed above us. Brown people laughed and waved as we ran. Finally, we were on the bus, heading to Buckhead where there was time for the second show.
A man, swaddled in loose white clothes, bronzed from the sun, his long blond hair tied up in a topknot, sat on a grassy knoll in Berkeley’s south side Ho Chi Minh Park, dreamily playing his flute. He played it well, sitting cross-legged and holding the divine instrument to his lips like a portrait of Krishna on the frieze of a temple.
In the park one day, swami nodded in my direction. I nodded back (as if I had been chosen). With a graceful wave of fingers, he beckoned me to his spot. His gestures, his music which wafted as gently as a birdsong, and as I came closer, his blue eyes (as blue as humanly possible) proved hypnotic. He invited me to sit beside him. He played to me. After he finished, he slipped his flute into a plain white pillowcase which he used to carry all his instruments (saxophones, clarinet, piccolos, silver flutes, and shakuhachi) back and forth from the town to the hills.
“You live in the hills?” I asked. I was skeptical. Berkeley is divided between the hills and flats. Class divides along the same lines.
“Would you like to visit?” his blue-burning eyes pierced my cranium. “Although you won’t be able to find it alone.”
What I soon discovered was Jason literally lived in the hills. That is, within the perimeter of Tilden Park in a pup tent camouflaged with bunch grasses, branches, and eucalyptus bark. He ate only uncooked food so meals were not a problem. He transported his supply of dried fruit, nuts, sprouts, and water from the co-op in the flats up to his camping spot. Liberated from roof and walls, he lived like a nomadic prince on magnificent public land.
During the rainy season, he rented a room in a house near campus, but when the weather was fine, he preferred to live outdoors. Soon, I saw Jason’s city room as well. Aside from a mattress on the floor and a stereo, it was filled, wall to wall, with LPs of jazz and Indian music.
Not only a musician, Jason was also a practitioner of Tantric yoga. My familiarity with Tantric was limited to a book of paintings, colors and shapes that looked related to Josef Albers rather than holy inspirations from the Himalayas.
“Tantra,” Jason explained, “was a spiritual practice devoted to sex.” He volunteered to be my spiritual guide.
First, I had to learn the basic principles of the practice. There were many. It was hard to keep track. The most important pertained to ritual bathing, ritual breathing, ritual visualization of colors, and sustaining sexual pleasure as long as possible. As our practice evolved (that is, having lots of sex), Jason informed me of additional principles. There were always new prescriptions and prohibitions. Whether invented on the spot, I could not say.
Although not listed in the Tantra’s how-to handbook, Jason smoked pot continuously. He considered the pot medicinal, used to mask the pain from a car accident that broke his back. At sixteen, he was delivered dead to a hospital, and his mother’s prayers brought him back to life. Jason came from a lineage of evangelist preachers on one side of Dallas, but love of reefer and jazz took him to the other side. When we went to hear Charlie Mingus, we had a front table at Keystone Corner where he and Charlie communed through vibes of mutual respect and understanding. Jason was a master musician, stoned in the hills.
For a few months, his enthralling spell was upon me. When the baby was with his father, he persuaded me to sleep out, not in his tent but inside a redwood tree trunk, a trunk hollowed out by lightening with an opening large enough to crawl in. We spread out a blanket and enjoyed the most spectacular private viewing of lights, bridges, and expanses of water and sky.
We camped at hot springs, north and south. We hiked in the hills. We feasted on dates and cheese. He played his flute, and I danced barefoot. It was a simple, pleasure-filled time. Even G-O-D visited me one night as a black box like a square in a Tantric painting.
My neighbor, Betty, asked me about the new man, lurking at all hours in the yard. She said he looked vaguely familiar.
When she was a student at Berkeley, walking from home to class, she once passed a man, leaning over a balcony and playing a flute. Playing it well. Naturally, the music attracted her. As she looked up, he looked down and beckoned her (with a wave of his enthralling fingers). She had no idea how to explain the hypnotic state that came over her, but she climbed the steps, entered a stranger’s apartment, lay down on a bed, and let him make love to her.
He told her then (as he later told me), “I was born to give women pleasure.”
“It’s the same man,” I assured her. The flute, the fingers, the singular purpose.
“In a different outfit,” we concluded. What attracted women then was different now. Swami was in, hippy out.
As the number of Jason’s rules increased, I grew rebellious and claustrophobic. I preferred sleeping indoors in a rectangular room on a bed. I preferred eating cooked food. I was tired of playing goddess. His insistence on pleasure wearied me. I wanted to return to a lowly, impure life.
We spent our last weekend at Geyser Hot Springs. On our way from the baths to the car, I stopped to talk to two young scientists embarked on experiments with the local water. After a short conversation, we walked on.
“Don’t ever lift your eyes to another man,” Jason threatened. Apparently, that was one of the rules.
I looked at him as if he might be joking. He wasn’t. He was furious, nearly choking on rage. Instantly, two things became clear to me: he was a lunatic and I was in grave danger.
When we returned to Berkeley, I told him I couldn’t see him anymore. He tried arguing. He tried sweet talk. He made promises, extravagant promises. He said he would give up Tantric yoga so we could have a child. Finally, he believed me and left me in peace.
A few years later, I saw Jason. He looked very different. He was wearing a denim suit (tailored slacks and blazer) and a cowboy hat. His face was wizened and hard. He was in town from Tampa where he worked for his uncle selling wigs. He said it was part of the Great Design. The next year, I received the sad news that he died in Florida of an overdose.
Occasionally, someone remembers that I knew him. They recall what an extraordinary musician he was. Whenever I hear the flute or drive by his field in Tilden Park, I send a little message to Jason, the man born to give women pleasure.