It was embarrassing to admit that I had experienced the entire first summer of the Summer of Love without getting laid. I justified the shame to my personal narcissism by reminding myself that it was called the Summer of Love not the Summer of Sex.
To make it worse, I ran into Liviana in Stanley Park on Labour Day. She was voluptuous in a skimpy see-through summer dress. When she saw me, she waved and rushed right over to me.
I thought, 'Ha, she can't resist me any longer and she's crawling back to beg me to deflower her.'
I remained cool. She ran into my arms, pressing her familiar Italian breasts against my chest. “Rocky, I've got something wonderful to tell you,” she gushed.
“Yes?” I led her confidently.
“I did it!” she whispered.
“Well, it's about time,” I scolded her not hearing what she had really said.
“I know, I know! I can't believe that I waited so long. I'm sorry it wasn't you ...”
It suddenly dawned on me, “... it wasn't me?”
“... No, but Mark was wonderful.”
“Mark?”
“Yes, Mark. Mark Wosk. He's a friend of yours isn't he?”
Once again I was the fool. I just wanted to get away from there. “Yeah, he's a friend. Hey! Congratulations. It's great to see you but I gotta go.”
She kissed my cheek, “great to see you too. Bye!”
As she skipped away I shouted after her, “He's double-o-seven you know.”
She looked confused and I smiled to myself, pleased with my little in-joke. Then she brightened and yelled back, “oh, yes, I know ... I know!”
Now I was confused. 'What did she mean by that?' I wondered. 'Was that some kind of kinky sexual position? How would I know?' Everyone was doing it except me. I was losing confidence and becoming even more introverted by the day. This was bound to make everything even more difficult.
I dragged myself back to Winston Churchill for my Grade Twelve year. This was the hardest opening since Grade One but I reasoned that this was the bell lap and I thought I could make it. It wouldn't be that easy.
The school informed me that I had failed every class and that I would have to repeat Grade Eleven. I had not bothered to pick up my final report card at the end of last year, so this was news to me. I protested by pointing out that I had passing grades all year. They chuckled a cruel chuckle and told me that, as I had not attended classes for the last two weeks of Grade Eleven, they failed me across the board.
“But you locked me in a room and wouldn’t let me out!” I screamed in frustration.
“Well, that was your choice wasn’t it?” was the smug reply.
My poor parents had been good to me. This would be hard on them. I had to try. I was back in Mr. Waring’s French 11 class. I was so depressed; I didn’t even give the girls a second glance.
Geoff and Steve had approached Al Horowitz about joining The Seeds of Time. Apparently, Segment 41 was a bit of a weekend band and Horowitz was looking for something a bit more real. He had agreed to come over for a meeting in Steve’s parents’ basement where we set up to practice. I was pretty excited about The ‘Witz. I believed he would put us over the top.
He arrived an hour late with Lindsay Mitchell in tow. There was no tension between Geoff and Lindsay. Geoff was so hip that he had forgotten about being fired and Lindsay had worked it over in his mind so often that he could justify it and rationalize it about a hundred different ways. I know this because he proceeded to tell us each and every way and then to re-justify and re-rationalize each way until he had created thousands of sub-groups and arguments that boggled the mind. He exhausted us. We never did play. Instead, we took a break to smoke a joint.
All six of us crammed into Sub-A-Lub parked in the lane out back. Geoff lit up, took a long pull and passed to Lindsay. We all watched in amazement as Lindsay inhaled the entire joint into his lungs. Then, as he sputtered to hold the smoke in, he continued to pontificate out the side of his mouth.
“Witz and I came to the realization that he should join Paisley Rain and I should join The Seeds of Time.” He paused and snorted and let out a little smoke. “You understand that ‘Witz is a trio player and I can play with keyboards. We have decided that this is best.” He blew a cloud of second hand smoke into the car and handed a tiny roach to Steve.
There was a long silence as the thick sweet fog enveloped us. We were stunned by both his logic and his lung capacity. We looked to The Witz. He sat there beaming a trillion-watt smile nodding his head enthusiastically in agreement. Al would say “yes” to anything, go anywhere and do anything as long as it was fun - My kind of attitude. We became instant friends.
“Huh, yeah. Okay,” said Steve looking to see if he could get even a short toke from the tiny nub. He gave up and tossed it out the window.
Geoff, Steve, John, Lindsay and Rock - Here was the cast of characters that would determine my destiny.
Al played with The Paisley Rain for a little while but, as Steve liked to say, “water finds its own level”, and soon Witz found his own level, back with his North Vancouver pals in Segment 41.
Lindsay had a rare off-white Gibson Les Paul guitar but lost the use of the free Fender Twin-Reverb amp when he left The Paisley Rain. He plugged into Steve’s Fender Bassman amp until Jim found him a Fender Bandmaster of his own. Tragically, he snapped the neck off of the Gibson when it fell on the floor at rehearsal. He bought a green Guild Starfire-5 as a replacement while the Gibson got shipped back to the factory for repairs. He was told it would be back in two weeks.
We didn't play much Top Forty and we never learned songs off of the record, we did our own interpretations. If Geoff knew some of the words to a song, we would figure out how it went and play along. Our resulting repertoire turned out to be a hodgepodge of songs like Fire and Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles' Hit the Road Jack and Elvis' Jailhouse Rock.
Our first gig together was at the end of September at our old haunting ground, Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity House at U.B.C.
Geoff brought along some hashish which we smoked in the parking lot during every break. We stood in a tight circle around him while he broke off a piece of hash, lay it on a piece of tin foil and applied a flame under it. We each had a rolled up one dollar bill that we used like a straw to suck up the smoke. I liked the hash high. It was a purer high than marijuana, and no exploding seeds.
We took breaks every fifteen minutes so that we could run out and toke up. The Frat boys were so drunk they didn't even notice. By the end of the night we were too bombed to tear down our instruments so we left everything there in the rubble.
Somebody had contacted Jim about organizing a Be-In at Kits Beach for the next day. The Grateful Dead were in town playing at the PNE Gardens and had agreed to play. The next morning Steve, John and I drove Sub-A-Lub to the Biltmore Hotel on Kingsway to pick up Jerry Garcia. The Dead were going to use our gear so Jerry had decided to come out with us to pick it up.
He settled into the passenger seat and pulled out the longest, fattest marijuana bomb that I had ever seen. He licked it and fired it up. As we drove along Broadway with billows of smoke wafting out of every window, Jerry marvelled at all of the gorgeous women on the streets. He said, “Man, these Vancouver chicks are the sweetest in the world.” I couldn't argue with him. It's true, Vancouver is home to the world’s most beautiful women. While we were weaving in and out of traffic the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten, was a little seven year old girl in the suburbs, the future Mrs. Hefner, West Vancouver's Kimberley Conrad, was three and the soon-to-be most sexiest woman of all time, Pamela Anderson, was two months