Introduction
"I found the dirt road with his ranch sign and headed west on it, back towards the Rio Grande. The ranch house was set amid a lot of feeding pens and corrals. It was one of those typical cheap rural homes with an unkempt yard and the butane tank sitting beside it. A couple of mongrel dogs came out barking at us and old Sam got his hair up but kept close to Buzz. A girl's voice called back the dogs, who for all their noise were wagging their tails. I rode up to the front porch and touched my straw Stetson to the girl standing there. She was about my age, blonde, her hair in a pony tail. She was wearing a checkered flannel shirt and jeans, her feet in a pair of awfully beat up moccasins ... She was cute and kind of bold looking.
"Rick Santos, ma'm," I said, and then told her about her daddy's troubles.
She thought the whole thing terribly funny and invited me to come in the house. I unsaddled and unpacked Buzz and Judy and turned them loose in a corral with a couple flakes of alfalfa Cindy provided. Sam got a can of dog food and he gobbled down with great satisfaction, since the ranch dogs just had to stare at him and drool. I dusted off the best I could and went into the house.
"You look like you just stepped out of a Marlboro ad," Cindy laughed as I clunked in with my spurs still on, "but you smell just like round-up time. Why don't you take a bath while I fix you something to eat?"
"Bath? I just had ... " I began, but trailed off realizing it had been some time ago.
"That's what we got indoor plumbing for," she said and hustled me off to a tight little bathroom full of hair curlers and little bottles. While I was taking a shower I heard the bathroom door open and close, and when I parted the curtain I found that my clothes were gone. I hollered for them through the door, but Cindy yelled back she had stuffed my stinking shirt and jeans into the washer and for me to wear a towel. This was getting embarrassing.
"I put away some scrambled eggs and ham sitting in the kitchen like some refugee from a Turkish bath. Cindy watched me eat with a kind of weird grin on her face. Finally she said: "You brown all over like that?"
"Anglos can sure be tactful. "Yeah, I'm half Mexican," I said, "and that means at least a quarter Indian."
"I like that," she said, now standing beside me, "I think it's neat to have a permanent tan." Her hand touched my shoulder and I felt her fingers run softly down my back. It sent goose pimples running out all over my skin, and I knew my face now really took on an Indian shade.
She felt me shiver and giggled. "Never been touched by a girl before, Rick?"
"Another dumb question. I had had my first piece of ass, a chola from Tucumcari, before this one knew the difference between a prick and a turnip. I had other worries.
"It's not that," I said, "but I can just see your daddy coming through that door with me like this and ... "
"Don't worry about that," she interrupted. "It'll take him the rest of the afternoon to fix that tire and get rid of the stock. Besides, you can hear that rig when it's empty a mile off on the ranch road. And I think you're neat!"
Her hand caressed my back and I felt her hot breath on the back of my neck as she leaned down and kissed it. Well, you lose the reins on a running bronc, then there ain't much you can do except ride with it. I felt a jerk under the towel as my cock adapted to the situation.
I turned around in the chair and brought her face down to mine, kissing her on her fragrant moist lips. A sweet tasting, teasing little tongue shot into my mouth, flicked around and withdrew. I held her and kissed her hard, not letting go until I felt her running out of breath.
"Wow!" she said when I released her and stood up. Her face flushed with pleasure when she looked at my body. The towel had a tent pole under it. "The flag is up!" she grinned, "Gentlemen, start your engines!"
I kissed her again, pressing her against my body. Her breasts were like hard loaves of bread against my chest and she thrust her hips against my cock. The towel fell down and she stared down at my cock.
"You really are brown all over," she said. I had her flannel shirt half unbuttoned, desire now really beginning to roar around inside me. Cindy twirled out of my grasp with a sly grin, then took me by the hand and led me to a bedroom. I prayed that I would not hear the rattle of a stock truck on the old ranch road.
"The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was plain and simple. That it was Cindy's was evident by all the bottles, hair dryers and things. There was a nude shot of Burt Reynolds next to a dresser mirror. I plopped down on the quilted bedspread and watched Cindy undress. She took off the shirt, her eyes on mine, then undid her bra. Out spilled a couple of lovely tits with rosy little nipples, all erect and perky. She kicked off her moccasins and peeled off her jeans together with her panties. She had a lovely, slim figure with a trim and tight ass. The centers of her breasts and her pubic area shone with triangles of untanned white.
"What do you use for a bathing suit, Kleenex?" I asked.
"I went riding in it once," she said, jumping onto the bed beside me, "and you should have seen the old foreman from the spread next to ours. When he saw me he craned his neck so much that he drove his pickup right through a pasture fence!"
She snuggled up to me cheerfully and in the embrace I forgot all about Hadley, Buzz, the hard miles I had covered and the San Juans I had to cross. She was warm and sensuous, wriggling her body as if trying to get into mine. My cock rubbed against her belly, already leaving a smeary track of lubricating juice. I ran my hands all over her, down her back, over the hard cheeks of that beautiful smooth ass of hers, between her thighs where I felt the rutting heat of her cunt.
"Your daddy know about this sort of thing?" I said.
She kissed me on the mouth. "He's not blind," she said, "but since mama died a couple of years he sort of took it for granted that I was taking on an adult role on the place, so he just keeps his opinions to himself. We get along just fine." Her hand ran up and down on my cock, fingering the swollen head. She propped it up so it pointed at the ceiling. "Just like an ear of Iowa corn," she smiled, "is that what they mean by Chicano Power?"
"Yeah, and it tastes like chili peppers with refried beans."
"Mmmm! I love hot foods!" she said and bent down to put it into her mouth. I watched the head go slowly into her parted lips, vanishing inside her mouth. Once inside, it bulged against her cheek, slowly moving towards the back of her jaws and into her throat. More and more of the brown hunk of meat vanished between those distended pink lips of hers until her nose touched my pubic hair. I felt the heat of her mouth along the whole shaft, the gentle twirling of the entire length of her tongue. Just as slowly her head began to rise, exposing inch after inch of my now glistening wet cock. She took out all but the very tip, and this she probed with the point of her tongue, sticking into the hole and letting the lube smear around on her pursed lips. Then she blew on it gently, but since it was wet it felt like a blizzard. Immediately she alternated this with hot licks of her tongue, simultaneously jacking me off with her hand. My cock jerked with pleasure every time she stroked it with her tongue, so she began to do it faster, flicking it around the base of the head and running it down the vein of the underside all the way down to my balls. These too she did not forget. They were drawn up tight up against my body, and she took each in turn into her mouth, caressing and rolling her tongue around it.
Watching her mouth my cock made me want to get somehow more involved, so I reached out for that lovely trim body of hers. She knew exactly what she wanted, for at my first touch she shifted herself so that her cunt was right over my face. I rolled her over onto her back, and still keeping her head pinned down with my cock I spread her legs and lowered my face onto her cunt. Spreading the outer lips with my fingers I found myself looking into the pink, flower-like petals of the clitoris hood and inner lips. It looked like an awfully little cunt, a virginal, underdeveloped teenybopper of a cunt. But when the tip of my tongue touched it, it reacted like a seasoned campaigner. At the first touch she gave a moan and a jerk which rammed my nose right into the hot, moist and fleshy interior. Slowly I ran my tongue up and down between the inner and outer lips, probing with it now and then at the entrance to her vagina. She responded with pleased jerks of her hips and a tightening of her mouth around my cock. I then got my arms and shoulders between her legs, spreading them apart and up towards her chest. This tipped up her ass, and I had the pink little pussy with its blonde whiskers exactly where I wanted it. I began to really ream her out now, drinking in the juice she was letting out of her. I twirled my tongue around the hood of the clitoris, poking with its tip for the clitoris itself and getting a muffled squeal out of Cindy every time I made contact with it. She loved it, her whole body began to twitch and her mouth gulped and sucked at me. I moved my hips, fucking into her face in rhythm to the flicks of my tongue over her cunt. When I felt her begin to jerk in spasms, I sucked in the inner lips, clitoris and all. Inside my mouth I made my tongue as compact and hard as possible and drove it between the lips against the clitoris, alternating this with powerful sucking, which in a few seconds caused her to gurgle on my cock and start coming into my face. Her thighs trembled and her now sloppy wet cunt plastered itself all over my face. In the heaves of her orgasm her hips jumped back and forth involuntarily, whipping her pussy over my nose, mouth and chin. She moaned and moaned as I sucked her viciously right through her entire orgasm. At last I felt her relax, then twitch a couple of times painfully, and I knew I had her finished for a while. Wiping my face on her thighs I looked down at her cock-filled face. It was flushed pink and spit and my juice was running out of the corners of her mouth down to her neck and ears. I could see her throat muscles work on milking my cock. I started to drive myself hard into her now, with long strokes that rammed my balls into her face. She sucked on gamely, and when she reached up and squeezed my balls, I felt the fire at the base of my cock surge forward and explode with a wave of jism inside her throat. She slurped and sucked faster, one hand squeezing my balls, the other poking a finger into my asshole. I pumped it all into her mouth, depositing a wad with every downstroke. She swallowed and coughed, and I saw some of it shoot out her nose.
At last she drained me. My arms were trembling in that push-up position from the wonderful sensation which I felt through my whole body. Slowly I eased my greasy cock out of her mouth and fell on my back. Cindy turned around, lay down on me and came at me with an open mouth full of semen. She sealed my lips with hers, her eyes glazed, and slowly probed my mouth with her tongue. I could taste the bitter, salty, sticky substance that I had filled her mouth with.
We lay there for some time resting, Cindy on my shoulder with a hand cupped around my balls. It had been so good. I wished that I could stay here in the bedroom, live on the ranch and have Cindy beside me like this. I could not bear the thought of once again saddling up and spending days and nights with a horse, dog and mule.
After a while Cindy's hand crept up my cock, her fingers lazily squeezing and toying with the limp and soft head. She began to talk, telling me about how she had been laid four years ago the first time, when she was just thirteen. How she had an affair with a hand on the ranch, how she got to liking sex so much that she could get hot just staring at a guy's jeans. It wasn't what you'd expect from a girl on a rural ranch, I guess, but maybe that was what really caused it. The isolation and all. I listened with only one ear, because I was concentrating on what her playful little fingers were doing. They were giving me a hard on again, that's what. When my cock became rigid in her hand she looked up as if surprised. With a sly smile she made it all wet with spit and then straddled me, manipulating it into her cunt. She tickled herself with it for a minute, and then had it right up against her hole. The top of it vanished in her blonde pussy hairs and I felt the tight ring of the entrance to her vagina on it like a Stetson that's a bit too small. But Cindy wiggled her ass, holding my cock in place, and suddenly the head slipped in, the warm glow of her insides making it inflate even more. She let go of it and let the weight of her body and gravity do the rest. I was surprised how easily it slid in, considering the small-looking apparatus she had down there. But down she came and in it went, until her ass touched my balls and my cock rested up against her cervix. She gave a pleased little sigh, undid the ribbon holding her pony tail and let her hair spill all over her face, her eyes smiling as she looked down on me.
"Let's do it as if we meant to make a kid," she said, "I just want to feel full of you inside me!"
I needed very little urging. The tight warmth encasing the length of my cock was enough. For a while she remained immobile on me, and then I felt a fantastic sensation. She was wiggling some kind of internal vaginal muscles. It felt like a gentle hand with the fingers milking my cock like a cow's udder. Jesus, I had never felt anything like it before. It made my back muscles tense and I shoved myself into her as far as I could go. Cindy began to rise up and down on me now, and I watched in fascination as my well greased glistening cock slid out then buried itself in that blonde snatch. I hardly had to do a thing. Cindy was delivering all the action. Her breasts bobbed as she increased her speed, and the rosettes around the nipples shriveled up while the nipples puckered up. I reached up and pinched them between my fingers, at the same time thrusting my hips up. Cindy leaned her head back, closed her eyes and smiled in pleasure. A little shiver ran through her body and I saw goose pimples on her arms. She picked a steady rhythm now, fucking me with a monotonous steady tempo which held me erect and eager but did not stimulate me to orgasm. She was clever, working herself up first so that I would not pop on her before she was ready. But when I let go of one breast and reached down between her legs, her whole body gave a jerk and she increased the speed of her bumps and grinds. My hand followed her body, my fingers stroking her clitoris, slowly but surely driving her up the walls. She began to breathe quickly, gasping now and again, her ass-now pounding up and down on my cock like a jackhammer. I fucked into her now with hard thrusts that sent her rocking like a rodeo rider on a bareback bronc. Finally she couldn't keep her balance and leaned on her arms for support, her boobs dangling and dancing spectacularly above me. I pounded cock into her amid the squishing and popping of her wet cunt and started coming amid whines and cries of painful pleasure. At the same time I felt the searing wad of orgasm ripping up from somewhere around my asshole and I socked it into her with all my strength, my semen shooting deep within her. Cindy now let out a scream of animal pleasure and ground herself down onto my spurting cock, her ass wiggling from side to side as if she wanted to get my whole body inside her. My cock gave a few more violent jerks inside her and then I was drained, the room almost getting dark around me. There was a lull during which the only thing audible were our gasping breaths. Cindy's stomach heaved as she fought to regain her breath and I could feel my own heart fluttering inside me. She gave a couple of violent shivers and then collapsed with a sigh on top of me. My cock got small very slowly and it was a while before it finally slipped out of her.
Carelessly we dozed off, and there would probably have been hell to pay if it hadn't been for old Sam. His barking woke me up and then I heard what got him riled. It was Cindy's daddy rattling down the road in the rig. You never saw a kid get his clothes out of the dryer and on him so fast. I barely had my shotguns buckled down when the screen door banged open and Sid Collins was standing there. Cindy gave him a nonchalant "Hi, Daddy!" and pretended to be busy at the sink. Old Sid gave her a squinty-eyed look and then glanced at me. Cindy had not tied up her hair, her shirt was out over her jeans, and it was plain she did not have her bra on. Sid shook his head and sighed, then handed me a newspaper.
"Boy, you better get saddled up. You made the Albuquerque papers," he said.
"He wasn't kidding, either. Right on page two. Horse thief, burglar. Armed. An old mug shot of me from some juvie files and a very long description of all my sins. Hadley outraged and offering reward. They even had figured out that I headed north.
"You done me a favor boy," Sid said with a glance at Cindy, "but before you do me any more around here I figure I'll pay you back. Get your stock together and we'll load 'em in the truck. I'll have you over the San Juans before dark."
Various and sundry reasons have been adduced, by critics and other observers of twentieth-century American culture, for the widespread disaffection of the upper-middle-class young of the United States. Parental abdication, the rise of the drug culture, the Vietnam War-all these "reasons" have had their day in the limelight only to be replaced by others, as anguished parents seek to explain the massive alienation of their children.
If the truth were known, of course, the finger would be pointed equally at these and several other major reasons for discontent, rather than at any single one of them. If the parent-child relationship is on a sound, functioning level, with ample display of mutual respect and with ample attention paid to the vital factor of mutual recognition irrespective of role, a single "generation gap" area of conflict will be insufficient to drive the offspring to a complete break with parental authority. It seems more likely that the cause is a massive breakdown of affection and understanding between the generations, or a personal-or, to borrow for a moment the special terminology of the late C. G. Jung, archetypal-level.
For the most part, it appears, the parents' understanding is clouded by ghosts from the past. The generation so avidly seeking to explain the loss of authority has based that authority on the laws relevant to an earlier time and not to the present.
This is not to suggest that those laws will not become relevant again to another time and place. History is demonstrably cyclic, as various commentators (notably Spengler and Toynbee) have forcefully and, to many readers, convincingly asserted. Nevertheless, the cyclic phase to which the laws of the parents' time refer has not yet returned to us; thus, the sound understanding they had of their own time will prove of limited aid at best in their attempt to understand their children, who after all will themselves grow old in a time ruled by other concerns. For an interesting-if overstated-statement of this point of view the reader is referred to Alvin Toffler's bestselling book-length conjecture Future Shock.
What the parents forget-and what their children ignore, equally to their peril-is that the parent's view itself represented a reaction against an earlier and equally "irrelevant" point of view.
Following the Great Depression-which was the older generation's Big Fact of Life, as the age of perpetual war is the Big Fact for their children-the earlier myth of the eternal visibility of Rugged Individualism was shattered for many people. For the first time many people understood that, in John Donne's words, "no man is an island, entire of itself." They saw all too clearly that their continued well-being was not so much a matter of individual effort or entrepreneurship but would perforce be dependent upon collective or corporate effort.
Thus the post-Depression years saw the rise of trade unionism, the end of child labor, and the enactment of compulsory education laws. There came, along with this, the realization that personal security, in times of strife, depended increasingly on the maintenance of a stable position in the hierarchy of a large-scale organization whose mandate was so broadly based as to allow for adequate sanctions against repression, in the form of massive strikes or other such concerted action. This included not only membership in the suddenly powerful labor unions but membership in bureaucratic Government organizations, membership whose maintenance was often as much a matter of "not rocking the boat" as anything.
The lesson was further confirmed by World War II, with its massive mobilization and its effect of organizing the totality of the citizenry into an all-out wartime economy, with few pigeonholes overlooked for the exact and comprehensive conversion of the people into file able numbers. The later period of intensive cross-filing of Government and other records only underlined this, reaching what some people thought the impassable nadir when, in the Sixties, the nation's Social Security and Internal Revenue files were fed into the same gigantic computer for cross-filing and cross-reference, the better to regulate the tax-paying habits of the citizens.
The period in which the real damage was done, however, was the Rooseveltian age of 1932-1942, and it had a permanent and scarringly deleterious effect on the mentality of Americans who survived, remembering bread lines, dust storms, and the days of thirty and even forty per cent unemployment.
The point is that before the Depression youth between the ages of, say, fourteen and twenty-four had more of a chance to come to grips with adult life by degrees. The individual was able to learn from the "hard knocks" of life. The measures of personal worth were to be found in one's self-image-in the attributes of craftsmanship or skills or individual entrepreneurship; in the open-frontier days of the Wild West this often had to do with prowess in the use of deadly weapons.
With the advent of the Corporate Identity and mass organizations, the rise of depersonalizing categorization by job function, and the eventual funneling of students into a more and more formalized and dehumanized educational system, we had, at one point, the "silent generation" of the Fifties. The ultimate achievement, in the eyes of True Believer members of this generation, was to get a good-paying job with a large corporation and to keep it. This required visible evidence of stability, and masters' and doctoral degrees were thought to be versions of this visible evidence.
The effect of this was to keep youth out of the labor market and in school until what the individualistic grandparents' generation would have thought advanced ages: twenty-one, twenty-two, even-in the case of veterans attending college on the GI Bill or in that of the vastly increased number of students studying for advanced degrees-as late as twenty-nine or thirty.
Sociologist Don Martindale put it this way:
Formal education tends to be a rather bloodless substitute for everyday life to begin with. When masses of individuals are crowded into the educational institutions to get them off the job market and off the streets, the remoteness from everyday realities increases. Great numbers of such students intuitively know that they are in educational institutions for want of something better to do, and tend to drift, doing only enough to stay afloat. It is often much easier for the indifferent masses to make an assault on the educational standards than to enter into fierce competition for grades.
Here Professor Martindale attacks the subject of the new political and social awareness on the part of many college students. He opines-somewhat wryly, if one reads between the lines-that modern youth has begun to develop and elaborate its own culture "with all its familiar forms" mainly through having nothing to do. Referring to the "hippie" movement of the Sixties, he says:
... a variety of the factors significant to the contemporary young come together; opposition to middle-class conventions; the urge to protest even when there is nothing to protest about; the uninhibited pursuit of sex; and the experiments on the control of experience by use of drugs.
The question of drug use will be largely ignored here. What is more germane to the present study is the breakdown of parental authority and, perhaps more striking, the substitution for it of peer group authority. The effect of this is commented upon by Theodore Ferdinand and in an essay entitled "Sex Behavior and the American Class Structure." Here Ferdinand maintains:
The spread of higher education among the middle class (and, one might add, the "disadvantaged" class) has meant that a substantial portion of American adolescents are regularly exposed to a social setting in which their sexual behavior is governed essentially by the adolescents themselves. Such a situation could not help but be more permissive than that which prevailed before the modern period ... A growing portion of the population is exposed to this permissive sexual environment. The sexual revolution in America, therefore, is largely a blend of existential and structural pressures impinging upon a segment of the total population.
This, as Bruno Bettelheim has shown in his study of peer-group authority and its effects in Israeli kibbutzim, is a mixed blessing at best. Along with one kind of permissiveness comes another kind of repression, subtler perhaps than the old parental version but equally authoritarian. And even the permissiveness has its deleterious effect in the blurring of the edges of identity, in the failure to establish accurate parameters of personality. This problem is also a special study of Erik Erikson, whose ideas were set forth in an interesting article in the September 1970 issue of Transaction magazine. In this piece the authors, William E. Henry and John H. Sims, describe Erikson's theories of "developmental stages" in personality thus:
A formalization of the nature and consequences of a sequence of what he [Erikson] terms "decisive encounters" between the predetermined biological and psychological capacities of the individual and his social environment. These stages are designated by polar terms, such as trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, intimacy versus isolation, which define the positive and negative extremes of their developmental alternatives. The issues ... are normally critical at a particular period ... because of the human organism's genetic timetable and the impact of social institutions coordinated to it.
The authors assert that, while identity formation is a lifelong process, it reaches a developmental crisis during adolescence, "a time when the physiological changes of puberty, in conjunction with the advent of major social demands, disrupt and challenge the sameness and continuities of experience upon which the individual had previously based his psychosocial self-definition."
The authors further explain that "Erikson postulates that society meets the individual's needs during this stage of identity crisis and supports his progress through it by granting an institutionalized period of delay between childhood and adulthood."
This idea of "institutionalized delay"-or "psychosocial moratorium," as Erikson terms it-is further developed by the authors:
This "psychosocial moratorium" provides the time required for the transition from child to adult, for the operation of the process of becoming ... Most important, the neophyte-adult has the opportunity to establish patterns of consistent and continuous experience in the new roles he has assumed, roles through which his society is able to identify him.
"Identity diffusion" is Erikson's term for what happens when the individual, for one reason or another, is unable to make use of the "psycho-social moratorium" to make his place in society and establish an identity:
Sexually, occupationally, socially, both he and society are unsure as to who he is or what he wants to become. Acute identity diffusion usually makes its appearance when the individual is faced with urgent and simultaneous demands for physical intimacy, occupational choice and psychosocial definition ... frightened abstention from making choices leads to a sense of isolation and emptiness. This can lead to psychological paralysis as the individual attempts vainly to reconcile his terror of committing himself with his desire to create and control his future.
One of the directions American youth has taken in recent years, when faced with the "psychological paralysis" described above, has been the "dropout" tactic. What had been a rare and, to society, reprehensible activity among the lonely crowd of the Fifties-running away from the necessity for choice, for self-definition, into an obscure interlude of self-discovery-became in the Sixties a mass movement with its own sources of sustenance, its own ideological basis; and the "obscure interlude" lasted, in many cases, far beyond the brief Wauderjahr concept of previous generations. This was indeed a lost generation-but a lost generation intent on proving that one man's loss is another man's discovery.
The germinal figure, in any examination of the-period, is the runaway child (and a certain stretching of the term "child" is presumed here). In the Sixties and the early Seventies his numbers grew to alarming proportions. He is central to any detailed examination of the age, and he is the subject of the present discussion.