During the mid-sixties, San Francisco's Haight Asbury district -or The Haight as it was known to residents--became the epicenter of hippie counter-culture in the USA. In January of 1967, about 4000 people converged on Golden Gate Park for the first hippie Love In, which featured early psychedelic bands such as the Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane. Over the next few months, 75,000 to 100,000 young people, known as "flower children", descended on the Haight district from all over the world for what the media labelled the "Summer of Love". These young people claimed they were pursuing a new way of life, free from mainstream American values, through protest, drugs, free love and alternative religions.
Many people presumed that the females in the movement--'hippie chicks' as they were called--were sexually insatiable and promiscuous, possessed extraordinary erotic skills and would "ball" anyone who showed the slightest bit of sensual interest in them. These women were often addressed by the generic name, 'Sunshine', a reference to their sunny dispositions and a popular brand of LSD circulating at the time.
The Hells Angels motorcycle club were also headquartered in The Haight at that time. Like the hippies, the
Angels spurned middle-class, bourgeois mores and had a fondness for drugs and casual sex. The two groups interacted regularly and even had a very loose, unofficial alliance that grew increasingly strained because of the Angels'
penchant for violence and conservative values, both of which were at odds with the hippies' philosophy. This alliance ended on December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Music Festival when the Hells Angels, who were providing security for the concert, clashed violently with the audience and members of bands performing at the concert. The Angels killed one person and badly beat dozens of others.
The president of the Angels at that time was the notorious Sonny Barger...
* * * * * *
Karma Comes to the Angels
(In The Mythical Summer of Love)
Karma's heart sank when Ezra announced his plan to exit the traffic-choked interstate and follow a series of rural back roads to the coast highway where they would turn north for the final leg of their journey. After a week of camping rough in Sequoia National Park, she desperately wanted to get back to their apartment in San Francisco, lower herself into a hot bath spiked with Frangipani oil and soak the itchy residue of grime, dried sweat and wood-smoke from her skin and hair. The detour, she pointed out to Ezra, would delay that pleasure by almost four hours.
"We'll get there when we get there," Ezra said, waving away her complaint. "You need to get over this hang up you have about time, Karma. It's just an artificial construct that distracts us from the reality of the now."
Inspired by his own profundity, he launched into a lecture on the importance of fully embracing the present, a monologue that Karma had heard so often she knew every word by heart.
As Ezra droned on, Karma's attention drifted to the landscape outside her window: low, rolling grassy hills scorched brown by the summer sun and dotted with stunted oak trees and rocky outcroppings. It occurred to her that this terrain was the perfect setting for a classic Western and she envisioned a posse of hell-bent-for-leather cowboys led by John Wayne swooping down out of the hills to surround their Volkswagen van.
"Alright, pilgrim," she imagined the Duke drawling to Ezra, "the little lady's coming back to the fort with us, comprendo? She's heard just about as much about the importance of living in the moment as a girl can stomach."
The fantasy made her chuckle and Ezra halted his monologue in mid-sentence. "Do these concepts amuse you?" he asked testily.
"No, no," Karma replied quickly. "Sorry, Ezra, go on. I'm listening."
Ezra sighed and shook his head. "Why do I even bother?" he muttered under his breath before pursing his lips into a tight smirk meant to convey the futility of imparting his wisdom to someone so undeserving; a mannerism Karma had become all too familiar with over the past six months. It still wounded her but the welcome relief she felt as he lapsed into petulant silence dulled the sting of his insult.
Karma had not always found Ezra's verbosity so trying. On the contrary, his loquaciousness was a significant factor in her initial attraction to him the day they'd met in Golden Gate Park at San Francisco's premier Love-In that past winter.
She had been sitting cross-legged on the edge of the crowd of dancers, her neurons sparking merrily under the effects of a tab of window pane acid as she listened to the band play a dirge-like song about a mysterious girl named Alice, when a man seated himself beside her. With his dark, brooding eyes, long, brown hair flowing over the embroidered collar of his linen shirt and fine-featured face half-covered with a thick beard, she thought he resembled George Harrison, the handsomest and sexiest of The Beatles in her opinion.
"Rati?" the man said to her with an undertone of astonishment in his voice. "Is that really you? How wonderful that you've decided to come to earth to honour us mortals with your divine presence!"
Straining to hear his words over the loud music, she leaned in closer to him and said, "Rati? Uh, I think you're confusing me with somebody. Is Rati a friend of yours?"
"No, no. Rati is the Hindu goddess of love and sensuality," he explained. "Are you sure you're not her? It doesn't seem possible that there could be two such beautiful entities in the universe!"
In Karma's experience, hippie pick-up lines were seldom more creative than 'Hey, babe, ya wanna ball?'. By comparison, Ezra's ice-breaker was positively Shakespearean and instantly charmed the twenty-year-old woman.
"Uh-uh, sorry, you've got the wrong chick," she had answered, entering into the playful spirit of his banter. "I'm just plain old Raelynn from East Oakland, not a goddess of anything. Not yet anyway."
Ezra winced and shook his head. "Raelynn? Oh, no, no, that won't do. Raelynn is far too mundane a name for such an otherworldly beauty. Hmmm. Let's see. Yes, I've got it! Today it was my karmic good fortune to connect with you, a radiant, otherworldly woman who I'm sure was my soul mate in a past life. I'm going to name you Karma. Yes, from now on, you are Karma!"
Fascinated by his eloquence, good looks and unabashed interest in her, Karma spent the duration of the Love-In hanging on Ezra's every word. That night they shared a lumpy mattress on the floor of his sparsely furnished apartment in The Haight and a week later, she moved in with him. She had barely unpacked her backpack when Ezra began to educate her on the fine points of Eastern religion, culture and philosophy.
Prior to meeting Ezra, Karma's attraction to San Francisco's hippie scene had stemmed mainly from its hedonistic ethos of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll rather than the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment and inner exploration that interested many of her counter-culture peers. Her idea of nirvana was ingesting various psychedelics, dancing to loud, frenetic music with whatever long-haired stranger caught her fancy and later, if the chemistry was right, sharing her tall, big-breasted and long-legged body with him.
But Ezra quickly convinced her of the spiritual rewards to be gained from practicing meditation and yoga, enhancing her Chi, realigning her Chakras, chanting the OM mantra, and studying the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and other sacred Indian texts. Inspired, she opened herself up to a brave new world of possibilities beyond, as Ezra phrased it, 'the narrow confines of your hopelessly earth-bound and atrophied consciousness".
Ezra was the first man Karma had ever met who appeared to have more interest in cultivating her mind and soul than ravishing her statuesque frame. He wanted, he said, to lead her into a state of profound spiritual awareness and grace, and a grateful Karma strove to be worthy of his guidance and attention.
There were times, however, when the demands of following Ezra's teachings were difficult to bear. Instead of transporting her into the shimmering realms of ecstasy that he spoke of incessantly, his rigid mentoring frequently left her feeling irritated, restless and frustrated.
Their camping trip in National Sequoia Park had been a case in point.
When Ezra had proposed the trip, Karma was jubilant. She loved being in nature and envisioned dropping acid and dancing naked under the gigantic redwoods, making love two or three times a day on beds of pine needles and wild flowers and spending evenings around the campfire smoking Acapulco Gold while gazing up at the vast, star-filled sky.
But the reality of the trip fell far short of her vision.
Ezra believed that LSD was "sacred medicine" and not meant for recreation. Three days into the excursion, he gave Karma a small dose of acid and insisted that she sit cross-legged in the hot mid-August sun as he read to her in a dreary monotone from the Tibetan Book of the Dead for several hours while hoards of mosquitos feasted on her sweaty, sun-reddened body.
Pot smoking around the fire at night was limited to a single bowl of weed imbibed from Ezra's small pipe, followed by chanting the OM mantra with eyes shut, oblivious to the display of celestial splendor unfolding above them.
But more than anything else, it was their love-making during the trip that had disappointed Karma as it had from their first night together. Karma liked her sex rough, wild and uninhibited. She loved the feel of greedy hands mauling her breasts and a hungry mouth slavering over her pussy before her lover positioned himself between her legs, eased his hard cock into her and seesawed away until orgasm engulfed her.
This was not Ezra's style. From their first night together in his apartment, he had insisted they practice his version of Tantric sex. This amounted to little more than lightly touching and kissing each others' naked bodies, sometimes for hours on end. Ezra had trouble attaining an erection so the act rarely involved penetration and never oral sex. Karma tried to dial down the voracity of her sex drive to sync with Ezra's cerebral, measured approach to the pleasures of the flesh. But it wasn't easy. She wanted more, and as hard as she tried to restrain her desires, she wasn't always successful. Once when Ezra was softly kissing her navel--as close as his mouth ever came to her vagina--, in frustration she had blurted out 'Please, Ezra, eat my pussy. Please!' Startled, Ezra lifted his head and, grimacing in disgust, declared the requested act "unsanitary and unnatural".
"Sexuality can either elevate or demean us," he explained afterwards. "Crude, animalistic rutting and debauched sexual activities like that just taint the divine spirit within us."
