The books were detailed and graphic but lacked warmth. Sex took place for its own sake, often part of a fierce power dynamic. Porn supplied me with an understanding of the mechanics of sex—anatomy, technique, timing, and aftermath—but no sense of intimacy. Women were fiercely resistant until forced into accepting their buried desire, whereupon they became compliant and willing. On the other hand, my experience with the fatman made me absolutely determined never to coerce another person into a vulnerable situation. These two attitudes conflicted. The result was extreme trepidation, beneath which lay the burning curiosity of all teenagers.
It never occurred to me that young women were just as interested in sex as I was. My assumption, based on porn and the conservative culture of the hills, was that females were essentially asexual. They had to be tricked into sex, or married. I didn’t want to participate in either scenario. Boys were prone to bragging about their sexual prowess, and I naively believed the lies I heard at school. It seemed as if everyone except me was having secret fun. Like most teenagers, I felt I had nowhere to turn, no one to trust.
I began spying on a hippie commune in a narrow holler, occasionally glimpsing a woman with no shirt. The hills offered free clay for potters, cheap rent in general, a gorgeous landscape, and soil that was highly suitable to the cultivation of marijuana. The current wave of visitors came from northern cities and spoke with heavy accents. Many were rich kids slumming, as if visiting Appalachia was a tour of duty necessary to acquire their countercultural bona fides back home. They arrived for brief periods and left. The old folks called them “hemorrhoids,” saying the good ones came down and went back up, but the bad ones came down and stayed. People left them alone.
After weeks of clandestinely watching the commune, I decided to steal their marijuana, then trade it back to them for sex. A buddy and I made a night mission, moving furtively along a ridge behind the hippie house and down through the woods. We used our pocketknives to cut the plant at the base and escaped into the shadows. The marijuana was more of a bush, and we didn’t know what to do with it.
In an abandoned smokehouse, we built a small fire and heated some leaves, which ignited. We began inhaling the acrid smoke and lay around pretending to be high, not really knowing the effects but making lofty claims—we could fly, see through walls, become invisible. Finally we admitted that the only results were seared throats and throbbing headaches. We concluded it had to be cured like tobacco, and I hatched a plan even more absurd than trading dope for sex.
We carefully stripped the leaves and packed them in four bread sacks, tied off the ends, and pressed them flat. We slid them under our clothes, hitchhiked to town, and went to a Laundromat. During a lull when it was empty, we dumped the marijuana into a dryer, cranked the heat to the highest setting, and stood guard. Within ten minutes the pungent scent of marijuana filled the Laundromat. We monitored the load, but the leaves hadn’t changed colors to indicate a quickened rate of curing. The next time we checked, half the leaves blew into the room and scattered across the floor. My buddy and I fled.
That summer our family attended MidwestCon, which turned out to be my last con. Dad said he’d driven the Mercedes into the Ohio River, to collect insurance money, and bought a VW squareback. My youngest sister rode in the back, tucked into a small space among the luggage. The minute we arrived at the hotel, Dad began operating in full John Cleve mode, refusing to acknowledge his children. The only other teenager at the con was the fourteen-year-old daughter of a minor SF writer who also wrote porn. We talked the first night. Tessa had run away to New Orleans for a while but now lived with her father, whom she hated. He ignored her and he drank and had too many rules. I told her I knew exactly what she meant. We agreed on everything—fans were the biggest weirdos in the world, cons were boring, and our parents didn’t care.
The next day I suggested we swim in the motel pool, mainly for an opportunity to see her in a bathing suit. She refused on the grounds that cons were full of old perverts, then crooked her finger in a “follow me” motion. We rode the elevator to the fifth floor, the walls of which were painted a deep shade of blue. She led me to a door with a sign that said “Housekeeping.” Inside was a wall of shelves that held sheets, towels, toilet paper, plastic cups, and tiny packages of soap. Tessa unfolded a roll-away bed. The only illumination came from a wide crack beneath the door.