Chapter 1 Claudia
I was sitting by our wood burner last evening. A pleasant night, it was cold and frosty outside but wonderful to be warm and cozy in our family living room. Adorned as it is with the detritus of a lifetime of bringing up a family full of its triumphs and ... well.... Not so triumphs. I say 'family' but there is now only my wife and son. My earlier wife Claudia, the much clichéd 'love of my life' died some time back, well before her time. My other three children I had with Claudia are long gone and making lifetimes of their own around the globe.
I had slipped on our old record player an album featuring Michael Nyman's music piece 'Time Lapse'. I had done this for a little inspiration.
Let me introduce myself. I am Mark Pledger, I am head of the English department at a local co-ed High School in Wellington, New Zealand and I am close to retirement. I had always wanted to be a teacher. I especially loved drama and over and above the normal curriculum I ran the school drama club. Every year I have composed a small play built around a piece of music for inspiration. I then had the students perform the same using a favorite piece of their own. The exercise is to introduce them to script writing.
I have never really wanted to be a professional playwright, director or actor. I never really had the ego or guts for that but I loved inspiring students in that direction and I had some successes. I am especially proud of my daughter Rachael who achieved some international success.
But I digress.
The reason I mention this, is that in listening to Nyman's music, it dawned on me how much it reflected my life. Like the proverbial turtle my life has plodded determinately and relentlessly against adversity and past obstacles, none the less at times with heroic and tiny fanfares.
How different from the music of our youth and I think of Peaches En Regalia, a Frank Zappa number which, would you believe it, actually preceded my first wife's entrance at our wedding. My wife and I were a product of the times, children of the revolution, born to the Age of Aquarius. Our music expressed our difference, our optimism for the future and above all our individually. We were reacting against depression, war and assassination. We had love; we had a new way for a new order or perhaps disorder. Our strident individuality was our downfall and our love and optimism unrequited.
Claudia was a committed protagonist of Women's liberation and like the rest of us revolutionaries was to become disillusioned. The movement never reached her lofty ideals and she was appalled at some of the directions it took. Maybe she never really fully recognized the gains it made. Certainly in the recent manifestations of feminism she would have approved of its intersectional character. She believed that women and men should march together toward a common understanding and did not see the movement as the power struggle between men and women it seemed to become.
I cannot say I fully understood Claudia but we shared some of the experiences that motivated her. It was probably for this reason that I allowed her the leeway to drift away from her family. A creature of her time, she was intellectual, she could not be confined by the humdrum of family life. She felt motivated to the greater good and felt it was our place, especially me as a privileged male to sacrifice for her contribution to the women's movement.
I think back to when we first met. It was not an auspicious beginning.
It was 1968. For me it was the end of a successful first year at varsity. It was a year that I indulged myself in love and literature. For most of the year I enjoyed love and sex with Beth, an older separated woman. It was an education that should have given me extra credits toward my degree for it certainly gave me greater insight into the novels and the drama I was absorbing. I had met Beth while helping clean up her flat after a party. Man, she was cool. She had short blonde hair and was tall and slender; a cross between Twiggy and Veruschka, you might say. She liked to wear glitzy makeup with the longest false eyelashes you ever saw; kind of like spiders. I could never work out why a cool chick like her would be interested in me. I did have good hair. You understand this was the sixties, long hair ruled.
I knew nobody at the party. I had just arrived, a small town guy in the big city. I don't know how I got there, I hadn't been invited, but there I was cleaning up and the coolest chick at the party checks me out. At the end she leads me by the arm into her bedroom. We started French kissing. I would not have been good at much else in sex but I loved French kissing. Beth's response was "Fuck mister, that tongue is long, you're staying the night," and she fell onto the bed dragging me down by my collars.
Sex with Beth was a new experience for me. Not the snog and feeling up sex on the bench seat of my father's Ford Falcon, sort of sex. This was sophisticated sex in Beth's own queen sized bed. Beth was the person that introduced me to her 'three way bliss.'
We had hardly hit the blankets when she hit me with, "Now listen to me, if you want to root me mister, you'll have to prove yourself by getting me off first. Have you ever been down on a chick?"
'Oh shit' thinks I, 'what's goin' down?'
Man, I was green.
To her I must have been a Tabula Rasa. She commenced my education, 'pleasuring a lady 101.'
And I have to hand it to her, I was lucky; Beth gave me an education most guys do not get.
For her she must have thought she was teaching me 'paint by numbers', step by step.
She was wearing a light psychedelic mini dress, light blue panties and no bra. She dispensed with the panties pretty quick.
"Lick my trigger, mister," she said pulling my face into the furry mass between her legs. (Did I mention that she was real blonde?) It was already very wet down there. It seems the first part of three way bliss was oral. My first task was to work the clit with my tongue, down the vulva flicking her fleshy tabs with my tongue then up the vagina. This was a first for me so it took a wee while to get over the 'ooo yicky' bit and actually like the taste of a fresh succulent pussy. Then it was back to the clit, suck. Stroke, nibble, nibble; lick, lick, lick.
Second part of three way bliss was fingering. "If you want a chick to be your lady, mister, you have got to talk to her about what she likes, you have to be gentle and experiment, explore a little. Now put one finger up my vag, move around and stroke. That's getting me wetter, now two fingers turn them up that's right stroke right there, little stroke, GENTLE!.... that's better; keep going, keep going. Now keep doing that and eat my pussy at the same time, yeah, yeah, yeah!"
"Right, now for the third; you have another hand, now explore my body, find my zones, massage my tits; stay; there keep massaging; keep that massage going, now squeeze the nipple NOT TO HARD!"
It didn't end that night and I have to say, and I hope Beth would agree with me, that practice makes perfect.
Beth made it plain that we were never going to be a permanent item. She would say things like, "when you are with another, this chick or that chick, you should do this or do that." Initially it hurt me when she said things like that because I was getting a little proprietary, but after a while I realized that this chick was way out of my league and she was just having some fun. I went for the ride. In fact we only met a couple of times a week, if that, and she could have had any number of guys on the go and I wouldn't have been the wiser. In retrospect I think her ex had been pretty domineering, she probably just liked having a novice to order around for a while.
Approaching my exams Beth up sticks and moved to London largely to escape her ex-husband but as a fashionista to pursue life with the other dedicated followers in swinging London. She had been enraptured by the flower children culture and hoped to be part of it. It was not a hard break for me, as in that year I was also absorbed and obsessed in my new world of academia. My relationship with Beth boosted my ego but to be truthful I was always a little bit in awe of her to actually fall in love.
Back home for the summer break I rapidly landed back to earth with my years adventures marginalized in a small city with no relevance to the academic world.
I took a short term job in a local joinery factory. It was only going to be about six weeks. My father was a partner in an engineering firm that was as part of a consortia undertaking aid work for underdeveloped countries. Over summer he was to fly over to Afghanistan to look at the feasibility of building modern abattoirs. Not a sexy subject for me but there was the opportunity to visit Afghanistan. At the time visiting Afghanistan was for the coolest of the cool so I successfully badgered him into taking the family and spending some extra time there.
The joinery job I got was through and old school friend, Clark. We were basically hammer hands turning out prefabricated components for classrooms buildings. There were a group there around about our age and we got to socialize out of work time.
I was the only student in the group and the only one with access to a car. It was my father's, a Ford Falcon. Unfortunately the responsibility of driving the car cut into my drinking and I ended being the chauffer for a number of very inebriated and often very dubious characters. As life turned out, less drinking was probably to my advantage.
Smoko time at the joinery was the time when we all drank tea and shared our experiences, fancies and fantasies. There began to be a recurring discussion around a place on the hill the boys called 'Gangy's Gap'. There were obvious reasons for the name, the location being secluded and well away from houses but easily accessible in a car. Some of these boys were rough and a couple of them including Clark's brother had spent time inside. Whether fact or fiction, they boasted of their experiences at Gangy's Gap.
This lead to Clark became somewhat obsessed by a fantasy that he should also have the experience of a gangy in Gangy's Gap as part of his life's story.
From my point of view I had been brought up to be a gentleman, I was a student; I had recently come off an affair with a sexually sophisticated woman and totally above such disgusting behavior. However I was 19; these were my mates and as I had no one else to socialize with, I was trying to fit in.
One particular Friday night four of us met up outside a dance hall. Clark had organized a crate of beer through an older mate. The dance was supervised and nobody smelling of alcohol was allowed in. So we sat inside in the Falcon, swigging beer in the hope that we could team up with some chicks in the carpark. Well there was no success for a while until five girls got out of a car giggling and talking with plummy voices. The boys got out of our car but the girls quickly entered the hall. Well, we milled around a bit until one very tipsy young lady reeled back out.
I yelled out to her to how come she is not inside? She replied that the bouncer knew she had been drinking and wouldn't let her in.
I couldn't believe that her friends had abandoned her. Unfortunately I had three guys with me who were taking an interest and whose intentions were not honorable.
