Gangy's Gap

Chapter 02 Arcadia

It came time to leave for Afghanistan with my family. Claudia travelled all the way to the international airport with her Mother to see us off. I was not prepared for how emotional I got at leaving her. Kiwi guys in those days just did not cry in front of girls, parents and especially no other guys. At one stage I had to disappear into the gents to compose myself.

In the weeks I was away we were largely in Kabul but we did travel around a little, visiting sights like the Buddha statues in Bamiyan. We also visited Kashmir staying on a house boat for a few nights before visiting Katmandu and finally leaving from Delhi.

I bought an ankle length Kaftan and some embroidered Nepalese boots for Claudia and an afghan sheepskin jacket for me. I wanted us to be the coolest dudes in town. I also bought a little Ganja and managed to get some acid off some American tourists and successfully secreted them in our collective luggage.

We arrived back with a month to go in time to enroll for varsity. While away I could not get any mail from her however I sent her an excessive number of post cards with one nearly every day.

Having not heard from her, I made my first act in arriving home seeing Claudia and giving her presents. She was ecstatic. " Wow gaaaroovy! Man, Man, am I your lady?... Yessss am I ever!" I boiled over with love and pride. The separation had not obviously weakened our bond. Just being near her had given me a hard on but we could only manage a hasty garden snog before being called in to dinner.

I spent the month teaching everything that Claudia would tolerate that Beth had taught me. Claudia learnt to love oral sex. I talked her into it, grandly saying that 'three way bliss' was the latest thing in London. (Actually it was a complete fabrication of Beth's but Claudia would never know.) Claudia liked oral sex when it was done on her; Blow jobs on me; reluctantly.

Going back to varsity, I had reserved a place in my old flat for myself with some mates before I left for Afghanistan, Claudia would be living in a hostel but she never spent much time there. It was 1969 and we were at the tail end of the flower children era. It was the year the revolution reached its zenith at Woodstock. The year that Charles Manson and Altamont brought the revolution to a stuttering halt.

Over the year we were an urban hippie power couple. We did clubs, we did the drugs, and we spun out on Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. I did my best to look like Eric Clapton. Claudia did her best to look like Julie Driscoll. Everything was far out, too much and groovy. My varsity grades faltered and Claudia... I really never knew how she did it...continued as her custom, this time exceling with a double major in Anthropology and Psychology. We always had plenty of friends at our table in the varsity café. We were the people to enter with at the varsity hops. Claudia and I, well, we fucked, fucked and fucked. We could never tire of one another.

Our year of romance had begun on the week of the student orientation. The first weekend Claudia arrived in Wellington we decided to drop a tab of acid each; just us. I had previously dropped with the some friends and was confident that the acid I had bought while away was strong and of good quality. I did not want to get nervous about the trip and I did not want Claudia to have a bad trip. I discussed this in preparation with those more experienced and had tripped with their girlfriends. We chose to do it in my bedroom. We had a good view to the east so we could trip overnight and see the sunrise. No one else was home that weekend as they were due to arrive on the Sunday night.

I let Claudia choose the music. She liked it soft and spacey Procul Harum, Moody Blues and of course Pink Floyd. We stripped naked for it but did not make love. Much of the trip, we just sat obsessed with each other and just staring. When I felt the trip coming on I began studying her features and gestures in detail. She was talking earnestly with deep intelligent eyes, smile flickering as she spoke and her brow just briefly wrinkling in synch. Her face sat at the apex of an equilateral triangle with her breasts. I decided that their proportions were perfectly balanced. Her breasts were to me perfection. They were strong for a young woman with just enough hang to give them weight. Her tan nipples were rigid and proud surrounded in nicely proportioned areolae. To me they were the absolute epitome of Claudia's woman hood. They were there to attract, to hold fast in pleasure and to feed. As I stared they began to grow in heroic proportions. I was transfixed with the rococo patterns shimmering up out of her nipples and spreading across her body disappearing into light that seemed to glow behind her. The thought of her as an angel crossed my mind and then she seemed to grow wings behind her and across the wall. I was muttering angel and Claudia replied you're an angel I can see your wings. "Wow, right on, far out!" I said, "we are both angels."

As we were utterly spaced out, it became the theme of the trip and cemented in our minds that we are on earth to be guardians for one another. There was no logic to that, there did not need to be. It became a thing, just something that reinforced the bond between us and we thereafter would often refer to each other as an angel.

At dawn we dressed and went for a walk in the Botanic gardens nearby as no one was around. Claudia walked peculiarly and kept looking around. Back in the flat I asked her what was going through her head. She said she had been walking giant steps and the sound was not coming from her feet but from way behind her. We then became absorbed into an intense discussion about meaning and perception. Claudia expounded, she didn't believe in the religious crap, as she put it. She reckoned that what we had experienced had nothing to do with reality, it was purely and simply our perception being altered. "To quote the great John Lennon," She said, "nothing is real but nothing to be hung about.' I bet he was tripping when he said that. Nothing in my trip was real. Reality sits outside belief and perception." If we implicitly regard belief and perception as absolute reality, we are doomed. "This is what she took from her trip; this was to be her manifesto. I had to agree. Suddenly in that period of coming down, her trip became mine.

We talked for hours. I mentioned my experience with her breasts and that lead to our genders as male and female. I expounded men as hunters, constructors, protectors, menders and defenders. Claudia suggested women life givers, nurturers, sustainers, nourishers, nurses, and managers. I questioned manager. It was an unusual suggestion for the time as they did not commonly appear in male dominated commerce as managers. Claudia replied, "But Women manage life in every other way, Think about it. At least that is indisputable, it is real. It is connected to nurturing." I saw a glimpse of what a Women's liberation might bring when Claudia wondered how management might conflict with leadership. It was then that I began to understand that my lady was a thinker and deeply intellectual. I mean, how old was this girl? She seemed to be mature beyond her years. As we continued to talk in greater depth Claudia increased my admiration to the point that I was not only her lover, I was her follower.

***************

Later that week a group of us camped up country in a forest park to consume the rest of my acid. It was to be our orientation happening. The location was on a river flat and remote from any houses. There were about eight of us. We brought essentials food, dope, tents and a cassette tape player for sound. I remember Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze blasting out across the valley. The girls had made floral hair wreaths for their hair. All being of the hippie persuasion, the guy's hair was long. One guy Ben had an afro which was considered freaking far out. Flared jeans, paisley and floral shirts and kaftans were the order of the afternoon. We all stripped naked and frolicked in the stream and grokked on the vibrations between us (Or so we said.) This was much to the consternation of two trampers who happened to hike out the bush at the height of our reverie.

We synchronized dance to the music, played guitars and flute, we ate off picnic blankets and some of use made love in the bush. Claudia and I waited until night. Nobody made any sense. The only determination we made that after an earlier conversation about Ken Kesey and the merry pranksters, we were going to get us a bus and call ourselves the' Raspberry Ravers' and travel New Zealand turning people on; to what? We never quite determined that part.

At one point Claudia and I retired to our little tent to make love. I could hear the strains of Cream's 'Tales of brave Ulysses.' Claudia and I knew all the words and sang our hearts out. The night was balmy and we were both still naked. We crawled alongside one another and embraced. Claudia began licking my neck and ears and I began to get an erection. The effect of the acid gave me the perception my appendage was swelling out of all proportion to my body. "Fuck, my cock is growing huge," Said I. Claudia was looking between her legs, "My cunt is huge, it's blowing my mind," replies Claudia, "and fucking juicy as a river." With that suggestion I suddenly had the impression of a sparkling white stream flowing from her cavernous cunt. "Fucking Juicy Lucy", said I. Then both of us started chanting, "Stick it in, stick it in, fucking Juicy Lucy," until someone told us to shut up. This trip introduced me to the other side of a duality within Claudia; the very thing that would bring her in conflict with herself and threaten her downfall, her intellect and her mindless sexuality.

The night carried on noisily. In the back ground someone was playing surrealistic pillow. There were screams, "Feed your head, yeah, take me higher!!"

I had taken along my camera to the happening, a Nikon F1 I had purchased on the way to Afghanistan. Apart from the trip, I am embarrassed to say, I had been impressed by Antonioni's 'Blow Up', a movie that had inspired me to become the next David Bailey. I have to say, there was not much product from my investment. However I did capture a photograph of Claudia that defined her and our year.

It was morning and we were coming down off the trip. I took a series of pics with Claudia posing, one was exceptional. Claudia was standing at the brow of the hill. She was dressed in her embroidered Kaftan and Nepalese boots. A slight breeze pressed at the kaftan accentuating her figure. The effect was highly erotic as it was clear she was naked under her kaftan. In the light you could make out her stiffened nipples and the kaftan pressed in between her legs, textured against her bush. Her stance was erect, proud and heroic. Behind her stood ti Kouka , a cabbage tree; a counterpoint. Claudia is a tall girl, she is slender but shapely with a full natural breasts. Her colouring marks her out as slightly Mediterranean, even Jewish perhaps, although there was no known connection. She had a mane of cascading black curly hair and a pale flawless skin. The girls had made up her brown eyes and long eye lashes, sultry and mysterious in Khol and mascara. Claudia proudly wore her floral hair wreath refreshed but slightly worse for wear, with her ornate gold Indian earrings; her beads and her bells. In the pale orange light of the morning she stood with the morning mist beginning to rise and dissipate in the breeze behind her. My image presented the scene as though it was a pre-Raphaelite painting. Think Rossetti, think Guinevere.

Simon Logan, the artist was with us that day. He once admitted that he had an unrequited love for Claudia and for a short time considered her his muse. He took my negative and used it to reinterpret the photo in a number of ways. Simon was not well known in New Zealand but eventually achieved success in the States. Most of these early works were considered too derivative of the Warhol style however one was unique. He was experimenting with solarizing and created what critics later recognized as the first manifestation of his coming brilliance. It is fortunate that my daughter Rachael tracked it down before he was widely published and she is now the proud owner of a significant artwork featuring her mother.

But me, I just love the original photograph. I have now resurrected and blown it up. It takes pride of place on my bedroom wall. I stare at it from time to time remembering that year of bliss; it is evocative of Patchouli oil and incense; of Joni Mitchell and Carole king. It to me also represents Claudia's nascent sexuality that she would ultimately find so difficult to control

Claudia's first year at Varsity was the year of our romantic love; my only year of such love. It probably sounds cheesy by today's standards but at the time Claudia inspired in me in a love of romantic poetry.

In many ways we were polar opposites but it worked for us in a complimentary way. Claudia's mind was driven by science. While at High School she had won a national science competition and a scholarship. Relaxing she might be reading a Scientific American or Psychology Today, me, a book of poetry. But I loved her knowledge and her patiently explaining to me in her enthusiastic way some science discovery and she seem to love my reciting of some obscure sonnet or other. When not studying or partaking in some hedonistic activity, we liked to go to the Botanic Gardens just to relax and read. I had a game where I would read poems by a Romantic writer substituting Claudia's name for their muse as though it came from me. As in Keats love poem to Emma;

And where thou art weary, I'll find thee a bed

Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head

There be, beauteous 'Claudia' I'll sit at thy feet

While my story of love I enraptur'd repeat

Like I said cheesy, but at the time we did not think so and Claudia loved it.

With the summer break descending on us, the pressure was on to show some exceptional cool. Claudia had an older brother John, who much to the disgust of her parents was living in a commune up north. He kept writing and badgering Claudia to move in with them. At the time it was fashionable and convenient for some to promote the hippie concept of free love. John was obviously a strong proponent of this. He said we had tuned in, turned on now it was time to drop out and experience free love. I was not happy about this ideal but I thought there would be no harm in visiting just to say we had been there done it more than anything else.

Claudia and I were lucky in that both our parents had the resources to supplement our bursaries so this year we elected not to work. We decided we would be going up country, thumbing our way to the commune. It would cap our year of romance. It would be our own personal summer of love.

The commune was in a quite remote area. We thumbed our way up country. Claudia was dressed in her jeans and embroidered blouse sporting a wide floppy brimmed hippie hat, complete with a peacock feather; me in Jeans and afghan jacket, fitting threads to meet the beautiful people. I was never to see that jacket again.

We had a couple of quickies in the bushes beside the state highway where a discrete opportunity arose while waiting between rides. Finally we tried to thumb our way up the unsealed country road, but there was no traffic and we had to walk, carrying our bags, a final 6 odd miles along a summer dusty and windy metaled country road in the blazing heat.

We arrived through a gate, or what had once been a gate. An old sign was to one side, worse for wear but still legible announcing 'Arcadia.' We figured that this had been the name of the farm or station that had once been here. We carried on up a rutted unsealed track through some Macrocarpa trees and into a flat unsealed yard. There were two young women there, both in rough floral summer dresses and sandals. One was obviously pregnant. They were both wearing bandanas and had long straight mousy hair. In the back ground, I could hear the strains of the doors, "Riders in the storm," Jim Morrison ominously droning on.

They were quite friendly but did not offer anything to two weary parched travelers. They ushered us on to the porch of what we assumed as the old farmhouse. The leader was not there at the time. They said he would be down closer to dinner time which they had been preparing inside. I do not remember the name they gave the leader but they called him Guru George behind his back. 'Guru" because that is how he came on; 'George' because he bore an unlikely resemblance to 'George of the Jungle, a cartoon character of the time. I have to say when I met him, I would agree.

Looking around I had a bad feeling about the place. The buildings were dilapidated and needed repair. It was not a well-kept farm. The girls warned us that the commune was about hard work, no drugs and no one was allowed their own possessions. I looked ruefully at my camera bag. Then they dropped the bombshell that blew my mind. All members of the commune were to be in effect married to one another and as such expected to have sex. On top of that as part of the welcoming ceremony it was expected that Guru George and the elder wife would have sex with the new comers as a way of breaking them in. Straight away a feeling of trepidation welled up in me. I am not sure how I could handle the jealousy. Under no circumstance would I normally consider sharing Claudia and I assumed she would think the same. I pulled her aside and suggested that we should perhaps just leave.

Claudia did not want to, not at least until she had seen her brother. He was not long in coming. It was only a few minutes later when he came down off the hills at the rear of the farm. He had seen Claudia from above so he was in a rush to welcome her running the last few yards. Claudia was overjoyed to see him and the embrace tightly. "Wow guys, out o' sight you guys could come, so cool, so cool, I'm getting cool vibrations off you guys; this is gonna be far out." John was effusive, but it seemed unreal. The welcome was not in his eyes.

John was about four years older than Claudia. Growing up she had idolized him, classically following him about wherever he went. In looks he was quite different than Claudia in fact they hardly looked like they were from the same family. He was blonde for a start, about the same height but muscular.

I was about to get a rude awakening to the relationship of the two when I discovered I was being relegated to an uncustomary second fiddle. My suggestion of leaving was scotched straight away with John assurances and that he would look after us. Claudia just told me not to be so uptight.

Eventually toward evening the others began arriving. We were taken to an old stable that had been converted at some stage into sleeping quarters. Everyone had an open stall with a minimum of privacy. Meals were cooked in the old farmhouse and a large open lean-to on the side served as a dining area. We all sat at one long table. There were some 9 guys and about 5 women besides us. Two of the women were pregnant and one was breast feeding baby.

Eventually Guru George and the elder wife arrived and were introduced to us. They both eyed us up and down. At this stage Claudia and John had their arms around each other's waist and I was feeling somewhat uncomfortable about that as well. The dinner was not elaborate and was composed of a vegetarian risotto dish spooned out from a large metal pot.

Following dinner the welcoming ceremony was announced. They would break out some wine; flagons of sweet sherry in their case. There would be music which was composed of a guitarist and another guy on penny whistle. We would drink the sherry and dance their special dance which they would teach us. The dance would lead into a slow shedding of clothes then once everyone was naked they would pair off and retire to their stalls. In the Guru and the elder wife's case they would take us to their bedrooms in the house. I looked at Claudia but she was in conversation with John and appeared to be avoiding my gaze.