Chapter 9

It was that night, after supper, after a sort of community time in the living room when we all discussed the coming love-in Sunday, what we wanted to do, what we wanted to take along...

Now Owl and I were upstairs. The door of the room was closed. A tall candle was lit in a deep red knobby-glass bowl. Murky red light leaped and flickered on the walls. On the ceiling over the bowl a golden circle of light pulsed in the center of the red dimness.

Owl said, "Let's get undressed."

"Why?" I didn't object, but we had made love for two hours that afternoon and I wondered if he wanted to go again, while high.

"Clothes are a drag. They're a bad scene. . They don't belong ... your body doesn't want them during a trip. At least mine doesn't." He dropped his pants, his one garment.

I took off my pedal pushers, shirt blouse and skinned down my panties. I was naked with him. I climbed on the bed. It squeaked and complained. It had done a lot of complaining earlier. The bass notes and a little of the melody from a Fudge record on the stereo came up through to us.

Owl came to the bed with foil wrapped sugar cubes. He settled beside me, on his back, and handed me one.

I unwrapped it and looked at it. "How big a dose is in this?"

"About two hundred mikes."

"Mikes?"

"Micrograms. It's kind of a low dose for a first tripper. You might not make it over your acid threshold."

"Oh," I didn't know what that meant exactly. It sounded like I had a small, safe dose in my hand and I felt reassured. "Do I just eat it?"

"Umhmm." He popped his into his mouth.

I did, too. It tasted like pure sugar. Then something occurred to me. "Will the penicillin we had injected this morning affect us now some way with the LSD?"

"I don't think so. I never heard of anything like that." Owl rolled to face me. "Don't worry. You'll have a good trip. You're one of us. You're my chick." He kissed me. "Mmmmm, sweet lips."

I laughed. "You, too."

He molded himself close against me. He didn't have an erection, though. He trailed a finger in circles on my breasts. He said, "It'll be at least fifteen minutes before you'll know if you're going up or not."

"What happens if I don't go up?"

He smiled. "Then you stay on the ground. It'll be like a pot high for you."

"Oh." I had never really been high on pot, either.

We talked about the trouble with Blackbird for a few minutes, then about Rill, and about my parents ... and all the time I was waiting in my mind for something to happen. I looked at my watch a lot.

Then Owl said, "I'm going."

"Goodbye."

We smiled. I swallowed and I could feel the saliva going down my throat. I became very conscious of it in the next few minutes. I told Owl.

He nodded. "That's one of the first signs."

A few minutes later I could feel the air rushing past the lining of my throat and bronchial tubes as I breathed. I sought Owl's hand and held it. I could feel myself going higher and higher with each breath.

He reassured me ... soothed me....

I could feel the weight of my hair pressing down gently on my skull. The blanket under my naked body became intricately textured and sensual to my skin.

Owl asked, "See colors yet?"

"No..." I waited expectantly, like I was waiting for the next bit of magic in a show. After another minute, I think, the flickering red candlelight began to pulse in a different way, and the room seemed to expand.

My hearing was affected, too, by the waves, the vibrations of energy that permeated me, my body and mind. I began to get an out-of-control feeling, a fear. It was weird and frightening. I gripped Owl's hand tight. I heard him whisper, "I'm with you, Lark. You're safe..." But his voice was distorted too loud and then it faded into silence, I couldn't hear him at all, but I did hear the stereo below us in the living room, and it was clear as a bell, not muffled, and it sounded as if the Fudge were playing down there, live, in person! I could hear them breathing as they sang and played!

And my vision it was like a crystalline, million-colored light show was going on in the room, superimposing itself, film-like, over the red and golden candlelight. It was astonishingly beautiful. But all these sense impressions were nearly overwhelming me.

My sense of touch sharpened ten times over. I was delighted. I could feel each slight shift of muscle tension in Owl's hand, and I could feel my body, inside and out, feeling good. It was like each nerve ending in each cell was sending a "feeling fine" message.

Owl's voice came back to me and I heard a hundred fine distinctions of intonation and shading of meaning in his words. I knew that it would be possible to understand a person totally, to psyche them out, just from hearing them speak a few words, if you could maintain this acute sensitivity for long enough, and could map out the significance of each infinitely fine shade of sound. No one could lie successfully, or be insincere, or hide schemes if a person trained to listen was near....

Owl's body close to me attracted me. I loved the sensation of skin against skin. I had never really felt before. I wasn't as afraid as before. I was more secure inside. I freed my hand and I think I smiled the most loving, beautiful smile in the world as I looked into his eyes and saw the love for me there. I was in a world of vibrant color and sound and sensitivity. I put my hand on his chest and touched the few little blonde hairs there, and the smooth skin and the warmth and the surge of his beating heart.

Everything had become supremely sensual. I was glad we had stripped. I couldn't have endured the tightness of the pedal pushers and panties on my skin. I'm sure a bra would have driven me crazy with rage.

Owl put his hand on my belly. It felt golden and alien and good and ticklish all at once.

I looked at my watch. It pulsed, too, and amid the distorting waves of color I saw that an hour had gone by magically. So quickly. But as I watched the sweep second hand it seemed to take an incredibly long time to go from second to second to second...

I wondered what my mother was doing ... and I saw her clearly in my mind, vividly, in the kitchen, alone, sitting in the breakfast nook, drinking her gin and Seven-up. I could feel her swampy self-pity and hatred for me and father. For a while I was her.

I began to sob.

Owl soothed me.

I swam out of her, in my mind, and was in the room again, the comforting, flickering, rippling room with the stereo below so real, and Owl holding me in his arms, so strong and loving.

I asked him, "How can they live that way? Why does everything have to be so rotten? Why is everything hate and take?"

"It isn't, it isn't. We're different. The tribe is different. Good vibrations, Lark ... good thoughts ... we'll change it. The tribe way. We'll spread our way and our love all through the young generations and the world will change. The shuck system will just die away. The old ones will die off and so will their way. Don't sweat it, darling. It's what's happening."

He was right. I could see it. A world based on honesty and love, real love based on self-respect and wanting to help people ... If the tribe could make it, why not other tribes millions of tribes?

Owl was stroking my thigh. The blonde fuzz on my skin was like thousands of tiny, sensitized tendrils contacting his hand, and the effect on me was erotic. I wanted him to suck me all over, to touch me all over, to fuck me and kiss me and I wanted to do it all to him, pleasure, in this wonderland of body-mind.

I couldn't hold back and pretend. My voice would have told him. Naked honesty was the only way for me, I knew it, and I accepted it. I said, "Let's make love."

"We're making love. We always will." He kissed my throat lightly. His fingertips drifted to my loins, to the opening into my body, and traced the vibrating, incredibly sensitive surfaces of those lips between my opening thighs, and ruffled the curly brown fuzz with the palm of his hand.

My own hand touched his body in brief contacts of awareness belly, tension of thigh muscles, the satiny heat of his penis, blood hot, full and hard and so wonderfully long ... long enough to reach into my womb, and beyond. The size filled my soft hand as I grasped it gently and lifted it into the sky of my mind.

I didn't lose contact I was on the bed, in the tribe house, high on LSD, seeing a transparent overlay of kaleidoscope color and rhythmic, pulsing energy. But the vibrations were leading me, taking me, guiding me to give my love, my soul.

I moved and it was a symphony of sensations to move. I opened my mouth, cavernous, wet and pink and hot and his mauve and white penis slid past my welcoming lips to my magic tongue, more and more, until my mouth was filled with velvet-skinned bulk and heat. I made of my mouth a tight, muscled, tongued vagina, alive and moving to give and give....

Owl accepted and groaned and let me worship as I wished.

Then he moved a myriad of time later and I felt the warmth of his breath on my breasts and the textured slipperiness of his tongue licking my erect nipples. And I accepted, and groaned as he opened me with gentle thumbs and delicately fitted his open lips, open mouth, to the wonderfully aroused center of my body, and his tongue ... his tongue ... his tongue!

Ripples of intense pleasure surged and broke like surf. I writhed in fast-slow ecstasy. I was in climax, in orgasm, continuously, burning, uncoiling a giant spring of pleasure that would never lose its power.

My belly rippled and spasmed. My breasts heaved and I needed more air for my body than there was air in the world. The pleasure shook me and jerked me on the bed and yet I demanded more ... in my primitive need ... the woman's instinctive plea for penetration, for the jetting of seed into her belly, and I gasped my need ... "Fuck me ... fuck me ... fuck me...."

He moved again, and his face was holy, and we kissed, and he entered my sparkling wetness. And oh, God, it was so much, so huge a feeling of completion as his penis slid deep and deep and ... oh ... God ... We were one, moving, fused and molten and wild in a sea of acute touch and smell and sight and hearing and love.

Owl ... wasn't Owl. He was part of me. I wasn't Lark, nor Juli Lund. I was part of him.

We groaned and gasped as he plunged and I took. The rippling, pulsating patterns of colors and sound faded before the growing intensity of our seething emotions and responses.

I was weeping and crying, "Yes yes yes yes yes ... " each time his wonderful length went in and the head compressed the violently sensitive mouth of my uterus. Each time a spasm tore through me and each time I wished he could push in more!

He moved into me more and more quickly, his flesh in me was rock hard, and his flesh under my hands, in my arms, was tense and slippery, hot and flushed. He was panting, taking short gasping breaths, driving in and in, slamming my wide open loins, sending his beautiful thing deeper still, distending me deep inside, tearing groans of pure inexpressible pleasure from me.

Then he cried out. He went crazy. He curled fingers under my hips, into my buttocks, and pressed in ... in ... more than ever before ... pulled me tight ... and inside Oh God an impossible thing happened! I felt it! Every organ was known to me. I felt the head of his penis pressing against the uterus and the mouth spasmed opened! It enclosed the glans with a fluctuating, soft agonizing suction that paralyzed us both with a sensation so impossible to describe ... Yet in my delirium I felt his sperm spurting into my womb! I felt his loins convulsing inside, shooting his seed into the heart of my woman's body...

And I knew I was dead there. I had refused his love by not being ready. I could not conceive. The pills had prevented it ... would prevent it....

Our act of love and union had been holy. I had blasphemed.

I rolled away from him and was ashamed! That perfect thing would never happen again and I had not been ready! I wanted to die! I didn't deserve to live!

I went into hysterics. I was screaming, twisting, fighting Owl. He had me by my wrists and was holding me down, keeping me on the bed as I thrashed wildly.

Then my energy gave out and I went limp. I hid my face from him. My body was wracked by huge, convulsive sobs.

Owl said over and over, "It isn't your fault, darling. It isn't your fault ... "

I didn't believe him.

I heard Zeke come into the room. I didn't look. They talked and Zeke called Owl a fool. Rill came to me and held me close. She was naked. Her big breasts were soft and warm.

I rolled away and said in a watery voice, "He's not! I am! I'm not a woman. I'm just a thing." I blinked fresh tears down my, face and began sobbing again. Some of my hair had worked into a corner of my mouth and I automatically fingered it aside and spat it out. It seemed to want to work its way down my throat, as if it was alive. Snakes. I clawed at my cheek to get the hairs away.

Rill took me into her arms again. "It's the acid, Lark. It's the acid. Remember it's only the acid ... You'll be all right. You'll be all right soon."

I clutched at her for comfort and security and love. I regressed a lot in those minutes. She was my mother ... a mother I never had ... and I was an infant like Tommy. I found myself sucking one of her big, long, teat-like nipples, bigger than Sparrow's. Rill stroked my hair and soothed me.

Zeke and Rill stayed with Owl and me for another three hours, till almost dawn. Then they went back to their room. I was calm by then and back down on the ground and resolved never to take acid again.

I had taken a trip, and I knew the territory, and I didn't want to go back up ever. The audio-visual-sensual show was fine, a groove, but the intensified emotional world the eruption of fears and hang-ups from dark corners and layers of the mind was too much of a price. I didn't want to pay it again.