Music has orchestrated many milestones in my life, its lyrics making pronouncements at pivotal points in my journey. The first time I really heard the songSuzanne by Leonard Cohen was in June of 1970.I was with one of my high school students. It was also the first time I ever got stoned.
Earlier that night, as outgoing Senior Advisor I’d given a rousing speech at the banquet using the words to Glenn Yarborough’s song Take it One More Round.
“Each time a newborn baby cries, the world gets another chance,” I’d told the sea of 300 teenagers I was facing as they graduated to whatever was next. On this auspicious occasion they too had a chance to “take it one more round!”I referring to peace, to activism, or choosing a career that would make a difference in somebody’s, anybody’s lives. But as I spoke, I really was thinking about Scott Dwyer who I knew wasn’t coming to the banquet.
Scott had a habit of pushing back a shock of his naturally blonde hair across his forehead from the left where he parted it. It helped me and all the other girls in the class get a better look at his crystal blue eyes, piercing eyes that framed those aquiline features and his pearly smooth complexion. His butt looked great in the tight jeans he always wore. I tried not to notice the outline of his cock, but it looked like the cover of the Rolling Stone album Sticky Fingers. That Indian turquoise and silver buckle drew my attention to it involuntarily. He always wore cowboy shirts that were one size too small and left at least three buttons open. His buddy Carl Reese, was taller and lankier with closely trimmed dark hair, and was already signed up for a stint in the Marines. Scott on the other hand, was going to SacramentoCity Community College , if his draft number didn’t turn out too low. If it did, he was thinking of filling out conscientious objector papers or moving to Canada .
Scott had boycotted the banquet; but he’d told me to stop by the Mobil station on 45th Avenue where he’d be working on the way home.
“Carl and I got you a going away present,” he said the last day of class. “Something that might help you with your studies next year at U.C. Davis.”They knew I was leaving Luther Burbank Senior High School for graduate school.
By the time I pulled up in my 1969 dark blue 912 Porsche, it was almost midnight . I leaned out of the window in my low cut black brocade dress, glad for the push-up bra that made my 120-pound body look like it had some cleavage.
“Fill her up!” I shouted over the din of a truck engine and the roar of the cars from the freeway overpass.
“Be glad to!” Scott replied bending half over to meet me eye to eye, “but I won’t get off for another half hour, and no doubt that husband of yours expects you home.”
“Jesu Christo!” I thought to my 24 year old self, “he is over eighteen isn’t he?”I couldn’t come up with anything remotely double entendre that could at once mask and shine a light on desire.
“Seriously,” Scott went on without blinking an eye, “I don’t work tomorrow and I just happen to have that sensimilla Carl and I got special for the teacher. After such a great year, we want to teach you something.”
“We?” I said swallowing hard, thinking that none of my husband’s music teacher friends up in Colfax ever even mentioned ‘smoking dope.’ Hell, he’d never mentioned anything fun. In fact I was still pissed that he wouldn’t suit up and show up at the banquet with me. So I’d told him since it was going to be over so late, that I would stay with a friend rather than drive home the sixty-five miles up Route 80.Jeanne Baldwin, the Home Economics teacher I shared an office with, had given me the key to her guest house ‘just in case.’ And, she was away for the weekend.
As I paid cash for the gas, Scott did that thing with his hair again, and took my hand. “Listen, don’t worry about Carl, he’s gone to that all night party down in Disneyland . Since you’re not officially my teacher anymore, let me give you that present.”
“Guess I won’t die wondering,” I said.
“This is just between you and me,” Scott went on,“ready?”
Oh, was I ready! Little did he know how those Bartholins glands I’d pointed to with that long stick in the lecture on female anatomy were already at work lubricating the moment.
“We-ell,” I managed to eek out with a slight cough, looking down at the keys in my hands.
“I’ve already taken care of everything,” Scott said. “My buddy owns the Motel DiCaprio and you can wait for me there. Room 111. Here’s the key. I’m starved though, could you pick up a pizza?”
“Munchie food, right?”
“You pick up the lingo quickly,” he went on, “but I was thinking it’d be for energy,” his hair falling back across his forehead,“and could you pick up a six pack of Sierra Nevada ?”
“Sure,” I answered, totally unaware I could have been breaking the law. When I looked at my hands they had a streak of car grease on them that matched my dress.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Take your time, you can even take a bath if you’d like. There’s a boom box in my truck over there, take it now, would ya?1269 Laguna Hills Road . Know where that is?”
“Mmmmm I’ll find it,” I said, hoping I wasn’t blushing.
At Sam’s, I ordered a pizza with ham and pineapple my favorite on one half, and on the other a meat lover’s special. I had a glass of wine while I waited. The pizzas smelled as good as Mario’s in Clifton , New Jersey where I’d gone to high school, but I bet they wouldn’t even come close.
At the motel, I barely had time to put the beer in the tiny fridge, and look at the tapes Scott had brought. I was just about to choose between Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà vu and Songs of Leonard Cohen when I heard a rhythmic knock on the door.
There he was, all smiles, his right pocket bulging with what must’ve been ‘the dope,’ a small gym bag over his shoulder, and a brown bag in his hand.I’d taken my stiletto heels off. Scott seemed so much taller than in class. I was still in the black dress I’d made myself. Nervously I wondered what I’d got myself into, but somehow I knew the ‘dope’ would help. Likewise the beer. He handed me one long gas station red rose in a plastic tube, and pulled two tiny scented candles out of the bag. God a romantic too! They were like the ones I used to light in church when older relatives were sick and dying. He also dumped what looked like five chocolate cherries wrapped in gold foil on the table, and two little bottles of Jose Cuervo.
“Sorry for no lemon or salt,” he said handing me tequila. “Make a toast.”
For once the teacher was almost speechless.
“Take it one more round!” I sort of half sang. I put my head back and poured what felt like molten hot lava down my throat and swallowed. My neck burned, my scalp tingled.
“I’m starved,” Scott said,” and grabbed a piece of the meatlovers, opened a beer on the edge of the table, and finished both before I could blink. “Want some?”
“Not yet,” I said taking a beer, “I ate too much at the banquet.”
“So were the festivities as stupid as I predicted? And that band, god. Something out of the fifties. Don’t they get that we’re the next generation?”
“The senior advisor gave a rousing speech to a standing ovation,” I said patting myself on the back.
“As I knew she would,” Scott said. “Listen before I shower, let’s start with lesson #1 rolling: papers.” He held up this tiny little package that I now know was Zig-Zags. “A cardboard book of matches that can double as a roach clip when the joint gets low. And wha’la, a lighter!”
He then took a plastic sandwich baggie out of that pocket, opened it, and put it under my nose. “Inhale ma-dam, this is California ’s best bud.”
It smelled dark and damp and wet, like a tropical forest, with a tinge of deep red fertile earth.He pulled two papers out, while I watched mesmerized as he glued them together by licking them with his tongue.Oooh that tongue, those lips, his beautiful skin. I restrained myself from making the first move and went into the bathroom and took my nylons off as he went over and put in Leonard Cohen.
“Now, since you don’t smoke, the first time might take some doing.”
“Never did, my father died of a heart attack when I was 19,” I said recalling him sitting on the toilet for hours in our white marbled bathroom, ashes falling on a pile of books next to him on the floor. Books with titles like Naked Lunch, The Sun Also Rises, and The Collected Works of Adlai Stevenson.
“Did I need to hear that?” he said. I quickly covered with something cute, I can’t remember what.
“No matter, cannabis doesn’t cause cancer,” Scott went on handing me one of the tiny cigarettes he’d rolled. It couldn’t’a been one quarter inch around.
“Take it in real slow, just a little at a time,”he demonstrated inhaling his. Then he continued talking sounding like Donald Duck, “hold the smoke in your lungs to the count of three.”
I followed his instructions, put the tiny white cigarette between my lips, and inhaled for a nano-second. But I coughed so hard I almost dropped the joint in his lap.
“Take it easy, bree-eethe,” he said. “Nothing to get hung up about.”
By the third or fourth try I did manage to count to three, and was actually able to blow out a long cloud of bluish smoke. By then the lighting in the room had started to take on a yellowish hue. I didn’t know if it was the candles, or whether he’d turned the dimmer down on the one square glass light in the center of the white tiled ceiling. I noted that the square tiles wore polka-dot holes of various sizes. I found myself wondering how the carpenter had to put the pieces together, was it like putting together a puzzle on the ceiling?
“Hey, I think you’re getting the drift of it!” Scott went on. Then he pulled off his red plaid cowboy shirt revealing more abs than I’d seen in what felt like way too many years of marriage and home cooking, but were only four. He reached into his gym bag and pulled out some huge headphones I’d seen airplane pilots use, and plugged them into his stereo.
“This’ll keep you busy while I shower,” he said putting them on my head, “why don’t you crawl in bed?” At that point I was total acquiescence. I’d do anything he said. Then Suzanne came on. I’d heard Leonard Cohen hundreds of times before, but all of a sudden I felt the guitar was strumming directly in front of me, and the choir backing up his poetry was right behind me in the room. I heard each of the parts as they blended and harmonized. The bells were being rung directly into my ears. My skin began to dance, and my whole system lubricate, as I heard the shower rain blessings on the moment.
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.
Well there were two firsts that night. Scottdidn’t feed me tea and oranges, but his perfect body touched my mind, or was it the other way around? We didn’t sleep a wink. This young man had certainly learned his lessons well in my Family Life and Sex Education class. We parted in the morning agreeing that it was ‘our secret.’ Except for Carl, he’d never tell anyone.
Carl never made it back from Viet Nam . Scott drew a low draft number, and I did write that letter supporting his conscientious objector status. The next Thanksgiving I drove up from Davis to British Columbia to see him, but I was divorced and with my new boyfriend. He was living in a commune and I wasn’t sure which of those young beautiful people were his lovers, but I could imagine him making love to them all.
Fifteen years later at a Women’s Studies conference in Indiana , as I was setting up to give a presentation on ‘Feminist Pornography,’ a young woman called across the room: “Jackie? Jackie Wilkinson!”
It was Vicki Panatella who had been in Scott’s graduating class. We had coffee after my talk and she told me everyone knew. Everyone had been jealous that I was the last one to see Scott before he moved to Canada . Then she thanked me explaining how I’d influenced her to get her Masters and go into teaching. Silently I floated back to the time one of my students had become the teacher.
Fond firsts. Two of them. No guilt. Just lovely memories of getting someone on your wavelength, letting the river answer, and knowing on some deep level that you’ve always been their lover.
Pat Hanson, Ph.D. is a veteran college Health & Human Sexuality instructor, and writer residing in Monterey, CA who is a columnist on sexuality & relationships for the new magazine: Crone: Women Coming of Age. (full resume & references on request: . (831-601-9195[email protected])
