The Creature from Love Creek Lodge
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
1 The Creature from Love Creek Lodge hat fall I was living in a cabin at Love Creek Lodge, a dormant Tresort and sometime nightclub nine miles north of Santa Cruz on Highway 9. The front of the lodge faced the highway, a wind- ing road that ran through the mountains from Santa Cruz over the summit, shaded even on sunny days by the steep slopes of the San Lorenzo Valley and the density of second-growth redwoods. The back of the property, down an embankment, was bordered by the confluence of Love Creek and the San Lorenzo River, ordinarily a feeble stream that during winter months could build to a roaring torrent. In the rainy season the valley was said to be so dark and damp that you could get athlete’s foot up to the knee. But the rains hadn’t started and the cool autumn air was electric with expecta- tion, streaming blue and lucid between the trees, charged with a strange urgency. The lodge wasn’t home but it was a good hideout. What was I hiding from? Everything. Julie. The fiasco of a bungled marriage. Graduate school. The pressures of respectability. History—I mean the pandemonium of the past couple of years, assassinations and 1 2 Stephen Kessler insurgencies, a war supposedly overseas that had invaded us, vio- lating our psyches with a shame and a rage too great to acknowl- edge, poisoning every thought. It was all just too confusing. I was a mess. I retreated to the woods in search of relief. Hiding. But it was a half-baked getaway. The other half was to play the role of the aspiring English professor, commuting to and from campus to attend my graduate seminars and earn my living as a TA. Imitation of a normal life, whatever that might be. From which at the same time I sought escape. When Julie moved down the year before from Berkeley, leaving her apartment in what by then was already a war zone to join me in my cottage in the suburbs of Santa Cruz, she was sacrificing the independence she’d gained so painfully from her family. While I was back east being a sensitive poet and budding intellectual at Bard, Julie was struggling to break free from an alcoholic mother whom she hated, a gynecologist father with artistic pretensions who’d long since left the family and remarried, the ghost of a big brother who’d perished in a motorcycle wreck at seventeen, and a heroin addict older sister caught in a series of abusive relations with sub-bohemian men. With a little financial help from her father while working part-time as a restaurant hostess, she had done well academically, made a few friends, and established a tiny island of stability on which to construct her life. A good-looking, green-eyed, long-legged brunette, she had no shortage of admir- ers, but my return to California after two years away restored our bondage to each other in ways we didn’t know how to untangle. The sexual revolution may have been fun for some people, an ongoing orgy of entwining limbs and freelance interpenetrations, but the popular expectation to make it with whoever happened to be there was more than I could cope with. When I was seventeen and she sixteen, Julie was the first one I was naked with. I couldn’t believe my luck. She was voluptuous. At the touch of her skin I came. Eventually we learned how to do it, and we did it with oth- ers too, but Julie remained my muse, the one who could inspire THE MENTAL TRAVELER 3 me when other young women—even as I strove to be a liberated stud—would leave me shy and shriveled. I in turn was her emo- tional anchor, a relatively solid point of reference, a comrade and confidant. During the summer and fall of ’68 I frequently found myself racing up Route 17 to her bed in Berkeley, or found her at my door for the same purpose. The more time we spent together, the more insecure we were about being apart. Finally, at the end of the quarter in December, I talked her into leaving school and giving up her place—the streets were getting more dangerous every day with student revolutionaries, Black Panther vigilantes, street people and hostile cops in constant confrontation—and moving in with me in Rio Del Mar, where she could hear the surf crashing peacefully beyond the eucalyptus and cypress trees and the sewage-treatment plant. At least she wouldn’t have tear gas to contend with. Tears, yes. Within weeks of her arrival she was panicking, insisting we get married. She’d given up everything. I owed it to her. She pleaded, she cried, she reasoned. A persuasive combi- nation, especially as we breathed the same eternally smoky air, staying forever high, smoking the joints she was constantly roll- ing with her slender trembling fingers and sealing with her sweet wet tongue, applying that tongue to mine, melting my brain with the heat of her gorgeous body. The logic of eros and marijuana prevailed. I couldn’t argue. I thought what the fuck and said okay already. In a matter of days we were standing before a justice of the peace in his room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Santa Teresa, a rundown retirement home downtown where all the tenants were about four times our age. The Reverend Smalley was ninety and didn’t get around too well; if you wanted his services you had to come to him. We brought three witnesses—colleagues of mine from grad school—said two poems, took our vows, and went out for dinner at Javier’s, our favorite Mexican restaurant. A painless enough procedure. The five of us went back to our place, drank champagne, got stoned, raved about the portentous prospects of 4 Stephen Kessler the new year (“Sixty-nine is gonna blow everybody’s mind,” said Julie, and we all laughed nervously), the witnesses went home, and we went to bed, consummating our nuptials in a beautiful fuck whose climax practically took off the top of my head. Next day I had a class to teach and Julie accompanied me to cam- pus. After the session we were to meet and resume our antihoney- moon. I found her in one of the student lounges yakking with manic intensity to a group of undergraduates who apparently found her monologue compelling. It happened she was talking about me, por- traying me, her husband, as a daring young bard and brain on fel- lowship in the doctoral program in literature but, more than that, a trippy wizard with awesome creative powers whose genius assured his imminent importance and, by association, hers. Inevitably we’d be famous, the Scott and Zelda of our generation, she to be known by her big floppy hats and high-heel boots and hysteria, and I for my brilliant as-yet-unwritten works. Of the half dozen students held captive by her rap, the most enthralled appeared to be a wiry little creature of ambiguous gender with short blond hair who couldn’t take his or her eyes off Julie’s face. When I appeared, inter- rupting the performance, everyone’s attention turned to me, and as we excused ourselves I felt the focus of those androgynous eyes. That was a Friday. The following Monday in the dining hall the skinny androgyne sat down across from me at lunch and intro- duced herself. Her name was April. “If you’re a poet,” she asked point-blank, “what are you doing in graduate school?” Good question. I had to think. “Well, I’m avoiding the Army, for one thing.” “That’s pretty smart. Anything else?” “Trying to get a Ph.D., I guess.” “What for?” I just looked back at her, incredulous. Her gray eyes were locked on mine, as if scrutinizing the inside of my head. “So what makes you a poet?” THE MENTAL TRAVELER 5 “I’ve, uh, published a few poems. I write poems.” “Where? Let’s see some.” “Little magazines. I don’t just carry them around.” “Maybe you could bring some. I’d like to read them.” “Okay. Sure. I’ll bring some poems.” “Your wife’s crazy, isn’t she.” It wasn’t a question. “She’s . high-strung, is how I’d describe her.” “Does she always talk like that, like the other day?” “I’m not sure; I didn’t really hear her. Why? What did she say?” April summarized Julie’s hourlong monologue, a breathless account of our day-old marriage, our history, our future, all in the mode of mythic gossip crawling with obscure allusions and a certain manic romanticism that gained associative momentum as she spoke. “She was very entertaining,” April concluded. “Why did you marry her?” “What do you mean, why did I marry her? What is this? What’s your trip?” “Just wondering. You seem sort of low-key. She’s so overamped. I was trying to figure it out.” Her directness disarmed, intrigued me. She was fresh. Within a week I was in her dorm room showing her my poems, which she didn’t react to one way or the other. We might have gone to bed but the dorm made me nervous—all those young girls running through the halls shouting and giggling, playing their records, brimming with a wild nubility—I was distracted, intimidated. I wasn’t lover enough. By early spring, while Julie grew more frantic, unable to focus on anything but me and the fiction of our stability, April and I had seduced each other.