The big day had finally arrived, and I was standing on the Watt Avenue ramp leading to Interstate 80 going east. Wearing a khaki shirt over faded bell-bottom jeans, my hair cascading over my shoulders — flanked on each side by a guitar case, backpack and sleeping bag — I must have looked very much the part I was playing on that summer day in 1969. I was beginning my second cross-country hitchhiking trip, my first as a legal adult, for which I had waited three years.

Around my neck I wore rainbow-colored beads threaded together by an ex-girlfriend, Nancy, just six months prior. She had been my first all-the-way lover since that runaway summer of 1966, and sex with her was like gorging on a feast after a very long famine. We had just come down from an acid trip sometime around New Years Eve, the two of us alone in the bedroom of a friend whose parents were frequently away. We were stretched out on a queen-sized bed, and I remember she wore nothing but those beads she would later pass on to me. For a girl of 17, she was very uninhibited — even introducing me to oral sex — and her generosity

more than made up for 3 years of frustrated heavy petting and daily masturbation.

It was a great relief at the time, but it was also too much too soon. For weeks on end, I glutted myself on raw sex with a partner too willing, who clung to me like a desperate hope. In Nancy's eyes we were a couple joined together for all time, and I began to back away when she fawned over me they way she did in that sweet, lovesick way of hers, kissing my hand or licking my ear in public. I really wanted out, so I broke it off after 4 months, from the day we were caught in the Prop Room smoking cigarettes after an hour of intimate groping, which got me expelled from the Drama Department and led to my decision to drop out of Encina. The beads were all that remained of that time.

On top of those beads was a plain leather strap supporting a small, silver wire-framed peace symbol, a gift from Judy, who was one of the reasons I broke it off with Nancy. I fondled Judy for only a day sometime in June, during a going away party two days before she left with her family for St. Petersburg, Florida. I only got to 2nd base, lacking a private place to do the deed.