She was driving, and I was daydreaming as I watched the brown hills on both sides of the highway. We were coming through a pass, down the eastern slope of the Sierras, on our way to Arizona. We weren't talking much. I didn't know what she thought of me, really. In my more paranoid moments, I worried that she didn't really approve of me at all, and just let me ride with her because she couldn't afford to make the trip alone. I knew she had been with men, but a great deal of her talk was anti-men, all about the myriad ways men oppress women. In her eyes, I was probably just another sexist pig. Maybe she was right, I decided, wondering what she looked like between her legs.
It was our first day on the road from San Francisco -- early November 1974. I was heading back to North Carolina after a summer in San Francisco. No, it wasn't the Summer of Love, which had been years earlier. By the time I got to Haight Street, every other storefront was boarded up, and drab, dirty panhandlers roamed the streets. But the counter-culture was still strong. For me, the city was a liberating place to be. People were living the ideas we had only talked about in college. There were food co-ops run by Communists -- real ones! I had been sorely tempted to stay, but decided to keep my commitment to start a new job back east at the end of the month. I decided to ride back with Allison, whose car was now loaded with all her belongings. She was returning, in time for the holidays, to live with her parents for a month or so before starting graduate school in January. She needed someone to share expenses.
Allison was short, with jet-black hair, perfectly straight, parted in the middle, down to her waist. And she had a face to die for. It was (and still is) a face of striking beauty, but strong. At first look you know she can be tough. She didn't smile that often, really, but when she did it was a wide smile, and her dark brown eyes sparkled. Her complexion is darkish, too -- one of her great-grandmothers was a Cherokee.
I had known her in college, but not well; she was in an outer circle of friends. Soon after graduation, she and her best friends -- three other girls -- moved to San Francisco and took their feminist leanings to new levels. But that is the last time I will call them "girls," a word they have foresworn for any female past puberty. They steeped themselves in feminist books, encounter groups, and self-help women's health workshops where they took off their jeans and gave themselves pelvic exams with speculums and hand mirrors. They wanted to take control of their own health. They wanted to escape all the games and be real women. They stopped using makeup. They stopped shaving their legs and underarms.
I knew all this because they let me sleep on the living-room floor of their flat in the Haight-Ashbury district when I drifted (hitchhiking) to San Francisco a year later. I lived there a whole month until I found a place of my own. I got to know them better and did my share of the housework. We had house meetings to air grievances and plan the week's menu and cleaning schedule. On the wall of the kitchen was that Maoist poster of a Chinese woman welder with bulging biceps.
Living with four women, I sometimes had trouble getting to sleep in my sleeping bag. Allison was my favorite, and she figured in my masturbatory fantasies. I never "hit on" her or any of her roommates. I guess I was intimated by their politics. I didn't want to make the wrong move and be condemned by all four of them as a "male chauvinist," a frequently used phrase in that household. But there was more to it than that. I had lusted after Allison ever since I saw her on campus freshman year. She was popular, usually accompanied by lots of friends, and I guess I thought she was unattainable. Getting to know her a little better in San Francisco didn't help. I figured wasn't good enough for her.
No, they didn't hate men. All were heterosexual and were sexually active to varying degrees. It was the Seventies, pre-AIDS. Some, including Allison, would bring men home to spend the night with them now and then, and their moans and grunts would usually arouse me. I resorted to "Rosy Palm," my faithful right hand.
And yet it is safe to say Allison had a chip on her shoulder. She and her roommates were always quick to take offense at any offhanded remark, no matter how offhanded or ironic, that could possibly be interpreted as a putdown of womankind. The way I saw it, I could not help having been born male and raised in a patriarchal society, but that excuse was scorned. I unwittingly sparked corrective lectures, which were delivered with varying degrees of resentment. I got used to it.
My daydreaming had turned into a deep sleep in which the smooth, brown hills became Allison's thighs, reclining. I didn't wake up until we pulled into the parking lot of a motel near the Arizona border. We could only afford one room, and at the check-in desk Allison made sure it had two beds.
