Trailer Park Hippie II: Hippies On The Hump

SIX: 1777 Coal St./October 1969

           To tell the truth, I was surprised Stoni was still with me on Coal Street at Christmastime. Two and a half months earlier, in October (almost two years since I’d last seen or talked to her), she had called me up out of nowhere one day. She’d run into the Ghost (not Casper; this Ghost was white and had been the guitar player in the Love Morticians) down in Clifton, where she’d gotten our number from him, and there was her hip, off-hand voice on the phone, just as though no time had passed. I couldn’t believe it, considering how we had ended the first chapter of our “relationship.”

During our two-year hiatus, I’d continued going with Tonya, graduated from Morton High School, left Tonya for Storm, gone toward California with Storm, and come back home. Now, I was alone (with my three hip housemates) in our very modest abode on Coal Street. Stoni, meanwhile, had actually married a guy from her Green Hills High School freak posse and moved farther down into Cincinnati. “Married?” I asked her on the phone the day she called. I was shocked that she would cop out to the Establishment by actually entering into traditional matrimony.

              “Yeah, it’s weird, I know,” she said. “I’m not really into him that much anymore, though.” Then she invited herself to our house, drove up from Cincinnati that very evening, spent the night with me, and continued doing so a couple of times a week through November and December and into January.

Whether Stoni had had s*x with anybody before I met her back in high school, I didn’t know. Maybe she had been a virgin and I the worldlier one of us by virtue of my backseat shenanigans with Robin Cox in junior high and my later explorations with Tonya in high school. Now that Stoni was married, though, she was a “woman of the world.” She had obviously done it with her husband, and she was ready to do it with me the first night she arrived at 1777 Coal Street.

              Her voice on the phone had brought her image back to me--the clean, fragrant scent of her and her full, pink-glossed mouth, at the back of which I had sometimes tasted a little smoke well neutralized with gum or mouthwash. I remembered the smell of her washed-twice-a-day, thin, straight, center-parted, shoulder-length blond hair and her White Shoulders perfume, the dry coolness of her hands and the slenderness of her body through her bright silk blouses and tight low-riding bell-bottoms. I remembered her just as I had first seen her at the Cellar back in high school.

              When she arrived at our house on the Hump two years later, we embraced and sat down to “catch up.” She made vague, apologetic references to the Tonya triangle of old, as if to show me how she had opened her mind since then. In high school, she confessed, she had looked like a freak and smoked dope and done acid like a freak, but had still been corrupted by middle-class values about personal relationships, monogamy, jealousy, etc. Now, however, she was really a freak in her heart and knew that nobody could possess anybody else. We were all free to express love to whomever we chose. Now she, not I, was the one officially attached to somebody else, but she knew it didn’t matter, and it was cool for us to ball, despite her marital status, right now, this night, though it had been two years since our last conversation. Lucky me, right, Reader?

              Well, if the Stoni I remembered from high school had shown up at my door on Coal Street that night in October, looking like the lead singer in the Shangri-Las, I would have been happy to comply and take her straight to bed, but this was not the case. Like some other hip women of our time, Stoni had “evolved” over the couple of years since I’d seen her. Becoming even more truly freaky than she used to be had affected her appearance. Attractively feminine dress and grooming evidently weren’t important to her anymore since she was no longer bound by the conventions of traditional gender roles. She had “progressed” from a mod and pretty kind of hip, in mini-skirts and boots and ironed hair and pinkish white lipstick, to a more natural hip, which included none of the above. Long and straight and blond no more, her hair was cut up above her shoulders and back to its natural brown. She had done away with her White Shoulders fragrance, Mary Quant lipstick, cat’s-eye makeup, boots, and flashy clothes. When she turned up on Coal Street, she wore a denim jacket over a tee shirt, old blue jeans, toe-hole sandals, no cosmetics, and a goofy-looking knit hat. Now, I, as the freakiest of freaks, understood the theory that dressing up, doing hair, and applying makeup were unnatural, middle-class conventions with which women had been oppressed for centuries, so I never would have thought of telling Stoni I missed the image that had attracted me to her in the first place, let alone confess that I had developed, since we’d last talked, an absolute craving for a dressed-up, made-up, high-heeled woman.

              I still liked her as much as ever, was thrilled to see her, my ego boosted by the fact that she had called me again after such a long time. I just couldn’t get too excited about her new look. I didn’t expect her to be as dolled up as Storm had been in Kansas City, but Stoni was now almost completely de-feminized. Oh, we were eventually able to do it, more or less, but it wasn’t anything like it had been with Storm or with Tonya or even with Robin Cox (her skirt up to her waist, her stockings and garter belt on display as I desperately ground my thirteen-year-old pelvis against hers in the back seat of the ‘62 Bonneville in which her mother chauffeured us nightly on long, lust-filled drives through the countryside).

Despite my lackluster performance that first night, Stoni kept coming back to Coal Street, probably thinking that the s*x would get better eventually. Her female wisdom must have told her the first time would be the worst time, and that things would improve as we got more comfortable. Things did not improve, however, because she continued to show up in her old jeans, which were not even very tight, for heaven’s sake, with her mousy brown hair, sandals, unpainted face, and that god-awful hat. I didn’t have anything like the nerve to suggest that we go take a stroll through Frederick’s of Hollywood to see if we could do something about her wardrobe, so I simply suffered in silence and continued to engage in uninspired (and uninspiring) relations with her. (I guess she must have loved me for my mind, Reader!) Her presence at Christmas and her continued efforts to pursue our renewed relationship were acts of true faith on her part. For some reason, she kept coming back to The Hump.

 S