by John Mattingly
I broke into adolescence in the middle 1960s, a time that became reknowned for free love. The concept of love being “free” capitulated to certain fiscal rigors by the 1980s, but there was a time when (call Ripley) a typical conversation between a young man and young woman went something like this …
“Hey, what’s happenin?”
“I’m like, freaking out over this tree. I mean, check out the way the branches go out, one after the other.”
“That is far out. Far f#&king out.”
“Oh, so you like to ball?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“My place is a couple blocks from here.”
“I usually like to ball after I have a little hummus.”
“Right on. I spread the olive oil just before I eat it.”
“Outta sight!”
Suffice it to say that APBA (after the pill, before AIDS) sex was relatively easy, free at least in spirit, and I don’t know exactly what it means that a person could fondly and passionately recall most of his or her APBA lovers. There was something there that endured. For some of us who lived through those days, it may even be viewed somewhat longingly as the good old days. People might think that farm folks missed out on free love. Think again. As one of my companions of the time said, “Farmers have the best equipment.”
Six miles east of my first farm lay a 40-acre homestead owned by a woman I will call Annie out of deference to her privacy. She kept a prolific assortment of goats, chickens, pigs, milk cows, fowl, dogs and cats, and produced a remarkable bounty from her garden. Her brussels sprouts were especially good: firm, tight little cabbages with just a hint of bitterness. Her melons were perfectly shaped and balled into juicy desserts. We became acquainted and intimate within the first hour of meeting, and because I also had a menagerie, we traded chores with each other so one of us could go away from our place for a few days.
One time I came over to Annie’s to do chores while she was away and found about three dozen bikers lounging about the ‘ol homestead. Apparently she’d put the word out that her place was a Drop Farm. After milking the goats, I nearly ran into a huge, hairy man in black leather holding a single chicken egg. Fighting back big, crocodile tears, he said, “I saw it, man, I saw the egg come out of her pussy.”
I don’t know why I suddenly waxed professorial, but I explained, “Chickens don’t have a pussy. They have a cloaca.”
“No,” he insisted, “it came outta her pussy. I saw it, man. It was a f#*kin miracle.”
In those days, it was easy to be overly focused on certain parts of the human anatomy and thus engage in misplaced anthropomorphisms.
I don’t recall where Annie went on her trips, probably somewhere on the West Coast for various essentials, but I recall she could drive straight through from somewhere for twenty or thirty hours, with nary a sandwich or cup of coffee, then step out of her VW bug looking fresh and suave as a runway model. Her natural beauty seemed unfair to those who spent a lot of time primping yet didn’t look nearly as good.
Annie went on to become an Amway magnate, selling skin creams and beauty products. People assumed her beauty was obtained from Amway products, but she confessed to me one day in the hay that she never used the stuff.
You’re probably thinking free love happened only for hippies and communal earth mamas and papas. Actually, however, I recall a lot of strip poker, strip Monopoly, and strip Scrabble APBA that elevated the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie. Since the demise of free love, pornography has increased a lot, so one might attempt the argument that suppression of free love has had the same effect on our culture as celibacy had on the Catholic Church.
The history of free love probably goes back to the first upright homo nonspecificus, but more recently, the progression from bohemian (or boho), to beatnik, to hippie took place on my watch. Bohos, like Henry Miller, weren’t bashful about the randy, and the royal, romps with freewheeling sexual partners in the grottos of sexy European cities.
I remember my grandmother showing me a picture in Look magazine of an extended beatnik family in Paris. “Just look at these pitiful children,” she cried, “the poor things have to play with beer cans. They probably don’t know which of those awful, bearded beatniks is their father.” She shook her head in disgust. “And probably, neither does the mother. Oh, promiscuity is a blight on humanity.”
Her horror became a source of humor to me when Annie and various farmers’ daughters came around my place in the ‘60s. We joked about how uptight the older generation was and had many good laughs over their misperceptions, all the while assuming we knew it all. But face it, it was a great time in history to wake up and hear your own voice changing or your hormones awakening, and notice that tight sweaters and ankle length skirts were disappearing, replaced by loose, see-through blouses and pumps or miniskirts that opened upon the borders to the Promised Land. And men wearing blue jeans below A-shirts, then became sexy rather than consiered wifebeaters.
The ‘60s was a time when no one I knew referred to sex as “sleeping together.” If asked that question in those days, “Did you sleep with him/her?” the most likely response would be, “Sleep? Who was sleeping?” It’s curious that sleep could somehow become synonymous with sex, unless the inference is that if you slept with the person, a greater degree of intimacy is likely—that is, you spent the night. The Bible referred to procreative intercourse as “knowing,” which makes a remote kind of sense, but “sleep?” If anyone out there knows the source of this euphemism I’d like to be informed.
But the good old days of free love are gone, at least as a way to describe and mark a time period with its own story. To those of us who survived it without an annoying or debilitating ailment, monogamy has proved to be blessed with practical advantages. The attribution “knowing” returns as relevant in describing a love with history and knowledge over relatively long times.
And finally, there is the issue of getting old and its related energy factors. I recall a song with the lyrics to the effect that having two lovers at the same time is like wearing a ball and chain. I remember catching an episode of Big Love a few years back, and found it ironic, even humorous, that the poor polygamist protagonist found himself physically drained and frustrated by the marital bedtime responsibilities that come with having three wives. And he was a young man. Free love does take a lot of energy.
Even so, you still gotta love it, if only in memory.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
