Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [154]
I spent afternoons during that summer hanging out at Portland’s Psychedelic Shop and Lair Hill park—places where the longhairs and bikers congregated. In the evenings, I and my friends would go around the corner from the Psychedelic Shop to the Crystal Ballroom, an old upstairs dance hall that had been a popular place for big bands during the Swing Era. The Crystal’s main dance floor was built over ball bearings, and during that summer, when bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service played there, the hippies would dance and skip in circles on the floor, making the whole room bounce and shimmy, like the deck of a drunken ship.
I met a young blond woman named Pamela at one of these shows. Every day for weeks afterward, Pamela and I would meet at the Psychedelic Shop and sit on the floor, talking, holding hands, kissing. Sometimes, after midnight, when our parents were asleep, we would have long, feverish phone conversations, talking about how much we loved each other, and whether we should have sex. We finally decided we should.
One day in late August we met at the Psychedelic Shop. Peter, Paul and Mary had released a new album, Album 1700, and we pooled our money and bought it. We took a bus to my home on Oatfield. My mother and Frank were both at work. Pamela and I made a quick bed on the floor of my mother’s old bedroom, and we put our new record on my portable stereo. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was just starting to play when Pamela laid down, opened her legs, and guided me inside her. When I climaxed, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was still playing. I was lying on top of Pamela, looking at her wide-open, pale blue eyes, stunned by the immense pleasure of still feeling myself inside her, when I heard the downstairs front door close. Somebody—my mother or Frank—was home early from work. Pamela got up hurriedly, grabbed her clothes, and hid in my mother’s closet. I got dressed and went downstairs, my heart pounding wildly. It was Frank, home early. Thank God.
I didn’t tell him I had a naked young woman in the closet upstairs, though I suppose I could have. Instead, through a convoluted set of movements, I managed to sneak Pamela out of the house without Frank ever knowing she was there, and then I met her later at Lair Hill Park.
I felt some guilt about the sex—after all, I had just committed a sin next to murder. It wasn’t small guilt, but it also wasn’t enough to prevent me from repeating the sin. One day, Pamela’s father figured out what his daughter and I were doing, and he confronted us as we were walking into Lair Hill Park, holding hands. He took Pamela by the arm and led her away, telling me I would never get to see her again. He answered the phone every time I called after that, and he always hung up on me. Pamela never called me back, and I never saw her again.
A LOT OF PEOPLE I KNEW WERE STARTING TO SMOKE MARIJUANA and take psychedelics. I thought about this particular temptation longer and harder than I had thought about having sex, but not that much longer. The first time I smoked enough marijuana to get high I was with two young men who, like myself, were members of the Mormon priesthood. We stayed up all night, talking about rock and & roll and girls and God.
A month or so later, it was Christmas. I and the same two Mormon boys decided we wanted some new records, but we didn’t have the money to buy them. We came up with an elaborate, foolproof scheme about how we could shoplift the albums from a big department store in downtown Portland without getting caught. We got caught immediately and were taken to a hidden office on the store’s top floor,