Lovers by the Lake Part Six

Chapter Six

Amy pulled a bottle of wine out of the ice chest and poured two plastic cups full. She handed one to Paul before she perched on the log she liked to use as a chair.

“Well Paul, let me continue were I left off. Going to college was a big step,” Amy stated as preamble to her tale.

As a native-born Californian, I had no trouble being accepted into the University of California, Berkeley. It was a big step out into a much bigger world. I soon found I was rather naïve. My parents did all they could to protect me from the complex reality lurking in the real world. So I really was not prepared.

Life in the dorm was a real eye-opener. Oh, sure, I always had lots of girlfriends, but I never had to live with them. The occasional slumber parties did not prepare me for life in a crowded dorm. Not having any control of who shared my room was a major concern. My roommate, Carol, was acceptable, but we didn’t share much in common.

Modesty and lack of privacy were areas I found the most disturbing. Sure, I’d seen nude women before. The showers in the high-school gym provided no privacy, but all the girls were eager to get dressed as soon as they could. I was not accustomed to seeing blatant displays of nudity it at all hours of the day and night.

Carol unabashedly paraded her nudity around the room with wanton delight. When I confronted her about dress codes for the room, Carol openly laughed and called me some kind of small-town prude. Carol proclaimed she felt comfortable with her body and did not feel any reason for covering her nudity. After that confrontation, I thought Carol went out of her way to parade around in the buff just to embarrass me. To my mother, nudity was a major taboo, but then the list of my mother’s taboos was very long. This confrontation of values made me question my beliefs and background even more. I felt my life was not really my life. It was like I was some actor in the wrong play, on the wrong stage.

I felt totally lost and constantly sought answers to the questions accumulating deep within my brain. Lost in the overwhelming crowds on campus, I felt detached. Oh, I was aware of the swirling whirlpool around me, but I never felt a part of it. Every day I was amazed anew at what was happening on campus.

It seemed like there was always something going on. It was the late sixties, and protests were everywhere. There were even more students speaking out against the military, against war, and against segregation. I found many people seem to speak to the voice within my soul. Other students shared my concerns about the environment, war, and many other issues. Through the student protests, I became aware of many issues I never was aware of until I heard them voiced by the shouting crowds.

On the University of California Berkeley campus, students burned effigies of the governor, Ronald Reagan, in the Quad daily. Their anger was a result of Reagan’s crackdown on political activity on campus. Protests sprang up demanding freedom of speech I was very sympathetic to their cause, but was too afraid to join their marches.

Cast adrift in the big world, I lost track of my friends—Jeff, Sam, and all my girlfriends. They were just addresses in a little book buried at the bottom of my purse. It took a long time before I found new friends in the dorm and in class. I found there was so much I did not know. I spent most of my free time in coffeehouses, listening to the strange poems of the beatniks.

College proved to be more of a learning experience than my parents or I expected. Going to the coffeehouses opened my mind to new ideas, and my new friends were inspirational. All the different viewpoints, freely discussed, gave me more insight to what I felt deep within my soul. I started to attend cultural events and art exhibits sponsored by the little coffeehouses.

I made most of my new friends in these off-campus meetings. There were many good-looking guys who showed interest in me. Most of them turned out to be just one more horny guy out for a good time. There was one guy I found to be very interesting. He was a regular at a local coffee shop.

I loved his poems, and when we talked, there seemed to be a melding of the soul. During these open exchanges of ideas, I found myself feeling the stirrings of attraction, stronger than the childish romantic bond I felt for Jeff or any of the other guys I’d gone out with. Now, when I listened to this man sing protest songs, or recite his poems with the deepest romantic images, I felt powerful urges completely new to me. Even though these urges seemed strange to me, I was witness to the fact they were not strange to the other women on campus. All too often, the little tag on dorm room door warned me that sex was in progress.

In the dorm there were lots of girls, each with a different back ground, and they were very open about what they wanted. Often the conversations were too vivid for me to listen to. When the girls were not talking about sex, they were talking about how they wanted to change the way women were treated.

The openness of their thoughts and the diversity of their backgrounds provoked me to accept ideas I never even thought of before. The daily confrontation with the openly sexual nature of life in the dorm forced me to take a new look at myself, my outlook on life, and my value system. As I became more and more aware of the growing reality of my womanhood, I was forced to confront these new realities.

The first challenge to my faith was the way the other women in the dorm viewed chastity. It seemed like I was the only virgin in college. With each passing day, I realized there were forces deep within me too powerful to resist. Wrapped in the spirit of freedom, lost in a new, exciting world, I found the poet I liked most had much more than just words to give.

He introduced me to the music of Bob Dylan; Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary; Woody Guthrie; and all the great folk singers of the time. His words and thoughts spoke to my soul. I found feelings for this man I never felt before. For a long time I did not even know his name. His stage name was Emu. It was a strange name but easy to remember. It took more than a month to gather the courage to approach him after his performance to talk to him.

At first I could only babble about how I loved his poems. In time he told me his given name was Mark, and he confided that he secretly looked for me in the crowd every night. I was not sure if it was the truth or just a line, he used with all the girls, it really didn’t matter. I was just happy he took the time to talk to me at all.

The first stammering conversation bloomed, and we settled down to a thought-provoking dialogue. I was so thrilled to find someone with the same burning questions. I started to visit the coffeehouse every night just to see Mark. By the end of the week, I felt I had to let him know how I felt, and I hoped he would not laugh at me as if I were some child with a silly childhood crush.

I was so relieved when he smiled in a soft, shy manor and told me he wanted to share much more than just ideas with me. Later, after the show, I went to his apartment, and we did much more than read poetry. We shared a joint then long, hot, passionate kisses. The kisses kindled a fire deep within me, and the fire of raw passion exploded. Mark wrapped his arms me. Our combined passion flashed and burned hot as our bodies writhed in wanton lust. A primeval scream erupted from deep within my soul and echoed off the walls. I could not stop the outpouring of raw lust until I felt my body falling thru the void of eternal bliss, after my orgasm subsided.

“Wow, Amy, so Mark got your cherry? That must have been a real game changer,” Paul interjected.

“Yes, he was the first, and it really did change my outlook on many things,” Amy confided.

I was so happy I could give to him the gift a girl can only give once. Opening that door was, in a way, very symbolic. It served to open up my mind to more of the events happening around me.

Before long I realized I was learning more in the Quad than in the classroom. The free-speech movement evolved into the free-sex movement. I heard and saw things very much at odds with my strict upbringing. I found myself floundering helplessly in the stormy torrents of sexual self-discovery. I was, at times, both shocked and thrilled at all of my new discoveries. Caught up in the emotions of the time, I was just one of the many young women who boldly removed their bras and tossed them into the bonfire as an expression of freedom and defiance.

Sexual experimentation was rampant, and I soon learned my spiritual upbringing was not as strong as my physical desires. In my quest for knowledge and understanding, I went to one of the adult book stores. Yes, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes bought a copy of the illustrated Kama Sutra. This book provided me with vivid images of all the possibilities to round out my sexual education.

Mark was my mentor during my sex education. I soon found sex was nothing like what my mother taught me to believe. This new knowledge made me question why my mother made sex such a taboo subject. I relished my newfound freedom, and my sexuality was a source of great pleasure and strengthened my resolve to make women’s rights a priority. Yet, it seemed like Mother was always on my mind, as if she were the prime source of this dilemma, constantly judging me.

Even my beloved romance novels didn’t help answer my new questions. This new knowledge did little to clear up my confusion. Emboldened by the openness of the other women on campus, I sought answers to my quest for identity by exploring my sexuality.

With Mark to guide me, I managed to avoid falling into the pitfalls of debauchery and total degradation. Even at my wildest of moments, I still, in some small part of my existence, sought the perfect lover, the lover I always dreamed about as a young girl. At times I thought it might be Mark.

I tried to attend classes, but I was often distracted by some protest Mark was participating in. The protests were often met with police force. It seemed the entire campus smelled of tear gas. During one of the protests against California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, tragedy struck.

The students were out in force, protesting. The political atmosphere was super charged. The Republican nomination conference was just across the bay in San Francisco. Barry Goldwater was being nominated as the Republican candidate for president. The wild protests on a state-run campus posed an image problem for the governor.

In an effort to restore order, Reagan sent the National Guard in to quell the riots. The students were massed in the quad. When the first barrage of tear gas was fired, there was a wild stampede. I was torn from Mark’s side as the masses rushed in every direction. The tear gas had its intended effect; my eyes were burning, and I could hardly see.

My lungs burned, and I choked uncontrollably. I gagged and vomited while stumbling blindly along with the pack of students, frantically trying to get away from the guardsmen. Only after I was a safe distance away and was able to clear my eyes and mind, I noticed Mark was nowhere to be seen.

At the risk of encountering the guardsmen, I retraced my path. Tear gas was still thick in the quad, but the guardsmen had moved on, in hot pursuit of the protesters. The fog of gas etched my eyes, greatly restricting visibility. Through the haze of smoke and tear-blurred vision, I saw a figure slumped on the ground. As I approached the shadowy figure, I could see a person retching spastically.

It was Mark! With each retching cough, blood gushed from his mouth. I dropped to the ground and cried out for someone to get some help. All I could do was hold Mark in my arms, rocking back and forth, waiting for the medics to get there. I was not allowed to ride in the ambulance as they took Mark to the hospital. It was even hard to find out where they took him, because I was not a blood relative or next of kin. I found a friend who worked in the admissions office, and she found the name of the hospital for me.

“You really are a woman of many facets. I can’t believe you were a protester. I mean, you just don’t look like one of those wild-eyed radicals you always see on the TV news,” Paul observed while he moved to sit down closer to Amy. He poured more wine into their cups.

“Well, the reason behind this is to get to know each other better. Just like you, I have a past filled with events defining who I am. Now maybe you can understand why I was so egger to do this,” Amy replied. After taking a sip of wine, she continued.

The hospital room was bleak, even with the sun shining in through the big window. Mark did not look good. His face was the color of ashes. I learned he fell down when the crowd started to run. The stampede of panicked students trampled him, resulting in four broken ribs. He was suffering from the aftereffects of inhaling tear gas for a long period.

I wanted to visit Mark daily, but my schedule prevented it. At the end of the second week, when I went to see him, he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, holding some official-looking documents in his hand and shaking his head.

“What are those about?” I asked.

“What is this all about?” he muttered. He took a breath, triggering a rasping cough. Once he controlled his cough, he said, “Well, this letter is to inform me I have been expelled from school due to conduct detrimental to the image of the college. This document is my draft notice. It seems, since I lost my college deferment, I’m being drafted. Sort of a strange coincidence,” he tried to explain between coughing spasms. “The only good news is I don’t have to report to the army until they release me from the hospital,” he continued.

Darkness closed in on me. I felt weak in the knees and fell to the bedside next to him. This just cannot be happening, I thought while trying to catch myself. An inspiration flashed into my brain. Literally jumping with joy, I bounced on the edge of the bed.

“I just had an idea. We could get married, and then you might not have to go into the army,” I exclaimed.

Mark assured me that getting married would not prevent him from being drafted. “If it was that easy to avoid the draft, everyone would be getting married,” he replied, dampening my enthusiasm. I thought he might be right, but I was not going to give up that easily.

I remembered something Jeff said about the army paying for living expenses, and I took it upon myself to contact the army recruiters to get details of the benefits for married couples. After a few more days of prodding and going over the benefits we could get, I got Mark to see the advantage of marriage.

In the end, Mark gave in, and we got married. To me this was the answer to all of my problems, and all my dreams seemed to be coming true. I sent a little note to my parents but did not allow enough time to be delivered in time for them to attend the simple ceremony. We were wed in the Berkeley court house. Was it true love? Was he the man I always dreamed of? I was not sure. To tell the truth, at the time, all I had were a few more unanswered questions.

“So you and Mark got married on the sly? You really do have a lot of surprises,” Paul asserted.

“Well, at the time, it was all I could do. I loved him so much, and the thought of him going off to war evoked the old romance novels within me. I had to let him know I would be waiting for his return,” Amy confessed.

We only had a few weeks before Mark reported to boot camp for basic training. The marriage was quickly arranged, and only a few of my friends from the dorm attended. Carol was my witness, and Mark had one of his poet friends witness for him. My parents did not get the invitation until after the fact. At first I thought they had not attended because they did not approve.

The wedding was on a Friday afternoon, the honeymoon lasted all weekend, and Mark reported to the processing center on Monday morning. After some paperwork was done, he was loaded on a bus and taken Fort Ord. This was one of the army’s primary training camps. It had been in the news a lot because of repeated outbreaks of meningitis.

Mark wrote a letter every day to let me know he was OK. The training was rough, and many of the young boys who were drafted right out of high school proved to be unable or unfit to take the brutalization from the drill sergeants. Mark thought about taking the easy way out, by failing the test, but he never thought of himself as a quitter. He easily saw that all the shouting was just a mind game. The drill sergeants were there to separate the men from the boys. He didn’t want to be seen as a boy. He wasn’t going to let them beat him. He knew he was smarter than they were, and he was determined to prove his superiority.

All of his letters were upbeat and positive. He never let me know how much his body hurt after a long day of low crawling under barbed wire with machine guns firing overhead. When things got tough, he would let his mind take flight into a special place where there was no pain. He even tried to help some of the younger recruits overcome their fears and agony. His drill sergeant rewarded his efforts by making him a squad leader.

After boot camp, he was given two weeks of leave to go home before shipping out. I was so happy to see him again. I was surprised to see how much stronger he looked. Mark told me it was no surprise he had gotten orders to go to Vietnam. The conflict continued to intensify, and almost all the draftees were distended to explore the jungles of Southeast Asia.

“I heard about the war, but it never really had any direct impact on me. The football scholarship shielded me from all that,” Paul reflected.

“Paul, I’m not judging you or anyone who was lucky enough to avoid the war. Mark really seemed to have an open mind about the situation. He even made statement about how it was one of those things someone had to do. Even after all these years, I still wonder if Vietnam was really worth the suffering we endured,” Amy said mournfully.

The United States never officially declared Vietnam a war, but the fighting was no less deadly. Mark was happy I could use the army housing allowance, taken out of his paycheck every month, to keep the small efficiency apartment off-campus. Low-ranking soldiers did not get any support for families, but they were required to make an allotment to their wives to ensure they had some support. The small apartment served us well as a love nest for the two weeks before his scheduled departure.

On the morning of his departure, I drove him to Travis Air Force Base to catch his flight to Vietnam. While we drove, I told Mark I missed my period and I thought I was pregnant. The news was a bit of a shock, but really no big surprise. It must have been from the first night of his return from training. Our pent-up passion was hot, and so was our lovemaking. I let Mark know there was a lot of catching up to do. I must admit I took great pleasure in tending to his desires. Mark was amazed at my sexual appetite.

I told him I dreamed of him making wild, passionate love to me every night while he was gone, and now I was going to get all that loving in the short time allotted to us. So the announcement of my pregnancy was really only to be expected. He wrapped his arms around me and said how happy he was. We kissed long and passionately in the crowded terminal lounge. We were not alone. The small terminal was full of young soldiers and their families.

Some of the youngest troops were accompanied by their parents. Others were with their wives, and some even had small children tugging at their uniform trousers. This was not a time anyone should have to face alone. There was sobbing, and everyone had tears running down their faces. Mark and I were just two lovers lost in the crowd. It could have been a scene from a World War Two Hollywood movie, except it was Mark and Amy Saxton, not John Wayne and Olivia de Havilland.

We were just another couple saying good-bye in the crowded terminal. It was just a few more tears lost in the endless sea of sadness. We were just two more lovers torn apart by a war no one really knew much about. It was just more fresh bodies being sent to the meat grinder to be ground up. It was only the prelude to the time the troops would be returned home a bit less than they were before they left.

Letters were written, but there was never any attempt to say what was really going on. I filled the pages with “I miss you” and “I love you.” Mark was happy to respond in kind, but his emotions were boiling over, and often love was not the uppermost emotion.

The deployment was only for one year, and he was sure he could handle anything for one year. I tried to send at least one letter a week to keep Mark up to date on what was going on. The pregnancy was the biggest topic. Mark never wrote about what he was doing or what he saw. He never told me about the carnage he was forced to live through. Those images were buried in his mind. He never wanted to bring such atrocities home to his family.

How could he explain the afternoon he spent at a rest camp, smoking and joking with some guys who proudly showed off the collection of ears they displayed on their belts? Each ear was cut from a “gook” they’d killed. How could he let me know he was in charge of a squad responsible for burning a village to the ground without checking to ensure there was no one in the shabby huts? Mark stored these images deep in his mind, hidden from his consciousness, hidden deep so no one could see the horrors he’d committed.

While Mark was deployed, I continued to study, but pregnancy made studying hard. Until Mark left I was not aware of how much I depended on him for emotional support. I had moved into the small student apartment with him even before we were married. The apartment was not anything like my house in the suburbs. I always lived in the suburbs in a beautiful house with a garden. When I was just a young girl, I often thought the Cleaver family must live on the same street. I grew up with high expectations, but what I could afford was not very high. Now I had to reside in a drab little efficiency apartment close to the campus. Mark sent the army allowance for the rent. That paid most of the bills but did little to support me emotionally.

“You know, it is hard for me to really comprehend how hard it was for people like you, dealing with the war and trying to live. At the time, I only worried about the next game. You must think I’m a shallow person, but back then, I only thought about me and my future,” Paul stated before draining his cup of wine. Without a word he took Amy’s cup and refilled them both. He sat down again before Amy resumed her story.

With Mark gone, I felt a vast emptiness, and all the unresolved questions of my youth were back to haunt me. The loneliness drove me to find a student to share the space with and get a little extra money. I posted an ad on the student bulletin board. I was surprised at how many women were looking for a place. After a few days and many interviews, I decided Beth was the best match. She was a great help around the apartment, and we helped each other study.

I needed someone to talk to, and Beth seemed to have many of the same interests, giving us a common bond. During our lengthy conversations, it was clear Beth seemed to be haunted with the same unresolved questions from her childhood.

Pregnancy made getting around difficult, but I was determined to find answers to those nebulous questions. When we were not bogged down with cramming for a test, we loved to travel to San Francisco. The city had a wonderful feeling of freedom. We loved to see the hippies on Heights and Ashbury. We would dance around with the Hare Krishna monks in their bright orange robes. At first, we thought the hippies might provide the answers we sought, but the hippies were even more lost than we were. The Hare Krishna monks seemed to be lost in their own strange world and had more questions than answers.

I soon decided neither of these groups could help. One day, Beth told me about a new group seeking new converts, called the People’s Temple. She said she talked to a group of followers, and she thought they might have some answers. She told me during the meeting that she learned their leader was a man named Jim Jones. According to the woman Beth talked to, Jones was the next best thing to the Second Coming.

“I talked to the women all afternoon. This is really a wonderful open culture of love and understanding,” Beth excitedly explained. “The women said they were in San Francisco as an advance party to find a location for a new People’s Temple. One woman I talked to seemed to be really sold on their teaching. She proclaimed that Jones reached out to her and provided her with all the answers to her problems,” Beth continued.

“Beth, you do seem to think this group is special. I know we’ve talked about finding answers to the questions we have on our minds. If you really think they can help, you have to take me to meet them. Let’s see if they have the something to help us,” I told her.

We met the group at a small coffeehouse. They explained how the People’s Temple was a group of enlightened people seeking a better life. Beth and I were impressed by what they said. They all seemed to be really dedicated to Jim Jones. I could see Beth was totally sold, and I was convinced. I decided to give this “People’s Temple” a chance. After all, what did I have to lose? If they were able to help Beth out, maybe they could answer my questions.

I found a feeling of overwhelming happiness in the People’s Temple. The other people all seemed to bond together in one big, happy family. Beth really felt the calling, she soon became one of the group leaders and was moving up quickly.

After a while, I became skeptical about the righteousness of the Temple. I found that part of Beth’s success was due to her sexual performance with influential individuals in the hierarchy. This led to second thoughts about what was really going on. I started to see how individuals were required to give up all their money to the Temple for nothing in return. Instead of getting answers, I found I had even more questions.

Was this really a new answer to mankind’s problems, or was it just a new scam? My skepticism grew when I noticed how the other members who asked questions were being abused. It didn’t take long before I became starkly aware that the People’s Temple, Later to be known as Jonestown, was just another scam to take money from those who were too unquestioning in their quest for self-identity. They were too willing to try to buy salvation and gave everything to a lunatic hungry for total control. Breaking away was not easy. The group went to great lengths to prevent anyone, who might spread negative information, from getting out.

Beth was now one of the high priests, and she sought to change my mind. It was her duty to prevent me from breaking away. I was able to convince Beth that it was only the impending birth of my baby forcing me to seek professional help at the local military hospital. Thank God Mark was in the military. After all, I did not have enough money to go to a local hospital. I did not want to go home and become a burden to my family.

Once I was outside the People’s Temple, I checked into the military hospital. I told them how I needed a new home. I explained about my problem with the organization known as the People’s Temple. It was hard to explain how a religious group made me fear for my life. I was greatly relieved to hear that the People’s Temple was moving out of San Francisco and relocating in some South American country. At least they would not be around to try to get me to return to the flock.

“I need a break and more coffee. How about you take over for a while?” Amy sighed with a yawn.