Winnie #3
He understood what it was like to want to be an artist, to savor wins and withstand rejection, to read and listen and want to write poems and songs that other people admired.
He was working as a session guitarist, playing gigs all around the Bay, but he made his living by plucking an upright bass at fancy weddings at the Fairmont in the city and the Claremont in Berkeley.
He was determined to make it without his mother’s help.
“She’s become kind of fanatical about mothering ever since she had another kid two years ago. A girl.”
“I think I read about that somewhere. What’s her name? Sophia?” Her father was some sort of producer.
“Seraphina.” He rolled his eyes.
“Seraphim.”
“Except she’s more of a devil. Mom literally cannot say no to her.
And she’s flipped some kind of switch inside my mom.
I mean, you remember her, right? Pretty laissez-faire?
Now she kind of hovers, and wants to have input on every last thing.
Plus, her new husband is a total ass. Big Hollywood mogul type.
Red car, huge house, gorgeous wife, perfect daughter.
I wouldn’t fall in line, and I just couldn’t watch what he was doing to Mom, so I put some distance between us. ”
“They’re in LA?”
He nodded, then took a deep breath and exhaled. “Anyway, I like it better up here.”
“I love it here. Even the fog.”
“Especially the fog.”
It was rolling in. The sky, which had been blue, had gone a fuzzy, familiar gray, and I could feel the dampness settling into my lungs, making me languid.
“I have my own place,” he said. “It’s nearby, if you want to go.”
I nodded, and he put his hand under my hair, then kissed me, and I felt a literal explosion in my chest.
Incredibly, that was the first time we had sex, and it felt in many ways like a continuation of all the fooling around we’d done when we were kids in cars, dark orchards, and corners of houses.
Not that we weren’t still kids, but we both knew what we were doing now in a way we hadn’t then, and that little bit of experience we each brought to his bed that night gave us an ease and eagerness that made the sex a perfect union of past and present.
As his hands and mouth caressed me, and I let his musky, fermenting need soak into my every pore, I forgave all those unanswered letters, forgot all the years I’d spent raging and questioning.
I’d have forgiven anything to stay like that forever.
After that first night together, Lincoln and I were inseparable and so obsessed with each other we became uniquely monogamous amid the free love revolution.
If he’d been with the girl from Magic Mountain before he saw me that day with his peach, he wasn’t after that, and our friends teased us for being the Old Married Couple.
I vacated the overcrowded group house and moved into his place, a modest one bedroom in a green-and-white Victorian that had been converted into three apartments on Cole Street.
He brought me daisies, and I made his favorite sandwiches to take with him to the construction jobs he’d started because he felt like the wedding gigs were draining his creative energy.
“I’d rather make money doing something else entirely,” he said, “and save all the good stuff for my own work.” We were each other’s first audiences, and we each knew exactly what to ask to help the other out of a rut with a song or a poem.
We read Rumi and Plath and Ginsberg and Lessing aloud to each other.
When he held my hand in line outside of a venue, it was the same as it had been in high school. Better.
Our home was a cocoon of sex and love and art.
Inside, we reveled in the goo of creation.
He’d work out songs on his guitar while I wrote lines of poetry in Moleskine after Moleskine.
We ate scrambled eggs in bed, and every Friday night there wasn’t a show, we had all our friends over for a blowout where we played music and argued about movies and concerts, which always seemed to end with making pancakes and bacon at two in the morning because the weed had made us ravenous.
We only did acid with each other because it made us so aroused.
But really, the sex itself was the most powerful drug of all.
I had never felt as close to another living being as I felt when Lincoln and I wrapped our bodies around each other.
We drank deeply of one another, our thirst unslakable, as if I was to him and he was to me something like the holy water at Lourdes.
I had never believed in souls till then.
But in the intensity of our lovemaking and our talking, I felt something inside me come alive—a heat and a light, a leviathan of energy that suffused every atom of my blood and bone—which had to be the life force the saints and prophets had been describing for millennia.
It was life affirming and life giving, and I wrote three journals full of poems in those first six months on Cole because I felt more alive and awake than I had ever believed possible. He wrote 117 songs.