heal all wounds, that there is no such thing as inherent evil. She couldn’t imagine such evil, so couldn’t guard against it. After a while, in self-defense, I lied to my friends about curfews (that I had one) and restrictions (that I had some). I wanted limits before I got eaten up. But by then it was too late.
I slept with my best male friend (to Pink Floyd, of course). I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend. All this would’ve been fine and dandy except I felt like shit. One of my friends laughingly called me a slut, but I knew she meant it. Another girlfriend wrote me a nasty letter after I slept with a guy I hadn’t known she liked.
As I got older, I did my best to have a protective boyfriend around, someone to fall back on, so I had a ‘legitimate’ excuse to turn people down. As if what I wanted didn’t count. Sorry, can’t menage a trois. My boyfriend, you know.
The fifteen-year-old my mother bedded became my lover fifteen years later. My mother abused him, he later abused me. Instigated by good ol’ free love.
I guess I’m lucky to be alive. I have no STDs, I’m HIV-negative. But free love exacted a terrible price on my family. These days I trust no one either over or under thirty. I have no real friends, no support, no closeness. Neither my brother nor I can keep a meaningful relationship going for very long before it self-destructs. We’ve both been in jail for domestic violence, and we both continue to flail in the maze of our desecrated sexuality.
Free love freely fostered self-hatred, which manifested itself in eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. I became so disconnected from my body that my gynecologist would find objects (tampons, condoms) left in my vagina for days. I didn’t feel them rotting inside me.
I was primed to be the sexiest, the wildest, the least hung up. Liberal. A hippie’s kid. Untainted by rules and regulations. Unconstrained. Free.
These days I have so many hang-ups, I’m surprised I can walk down the street without tripping. And actually, there were years when I
If you saw me now you’d have no inkling that I used to dance to the blues in such a way that the musicians all had hard-ons, that my favorite movie, after The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was 9 ‘
Today I rarely wear revealing clothes outside of the house. I don’t like dirty jokes or double entendres, and I hate Valentine’s Day, with its corresponding message, ‘Everybody copulate!’ Some would call me frigid.
I read self-help books that say sex is healthy, sexual urges are normal, I’m not a slut. But that vaguely echoes what my mother taught me. Sex is good. Sex is fun. Sex is sport.
Nowadays I have only fantasies, because I am too damn tired to deal with people. After so many years of sexual abuse, and being the sexiest slut on the block, ironically, I can’t have sex.
For a period of time, I cried every time I came, and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained weight, wore baggy clothes, shaved my head.
I call myself bisexual, but in truth, I’m asexual. Celibate. Scared even to flirt. Because flirting leads to sex- inevitably, mandatorily, to sex. So I don’t even start. Everyone I know is safely partnered up.
Deep down inside I am conservative. I don’t like multiple lovers, I only want to sleep with one person. I pretended to separate sex from love, but I was only fooling (and abusing) myself. Sex
I have a hard time imagining someone really loving me unless I fuck her into the ground. As if sexual prowess ensures love or even monogamy. The well-trained concubine.
Now I am scared of anything sexual, afraid I can’t control myself, that I’ll eke back into my yay-saying ways. I’m afraid to do anything other than write and fantasize.
But I’m lonely. Lonely for love, for companionship, for touch. My body betrays me by craving caresses, coveting kisses, melting under hugs. I am a sensual being. All the ugly, baggy clothes in the world won’t stop my body from responding to smells, sounds, touches, tastes. My sex drive rears its ugly head frequently. Repression only works for so long. Eruption is imminent.
Eventually I’ll have to reconcile this with the sex abuse. Every month (probably hormonal) I get horny, masturbate, then feel extraordinarily degraded and ashamed. Bad.
Not good.
I’ve taken to writing violent pornography which offends my feminist sensibilities, but for some reason (Bye-Bye Blackbird?) keeps coming up. I read porn too, and it shames me.
Ten thousand dollars in therapy bills later, the love I gained through sex, or free love, is nonexistent.
The cost of ‘free’ love? Self-esteem. Happiness.
A few things have changed. The Beatles are still gods, but my mother has had plastic surgery. And I am slowly healing from my parents’ fling with free love. I guess the pendulum had to swing to the other extreme for me to achieve balance. I’m learning that not everything is black or white. I can grab the grays and define them. I just hope I recognize the happy medium when it hits.
When I come out of my promiscuity backlash, my own little frigid movement, I hope to feel safe and powerful and sexual. Something I can almost imagine. But not quite.
I
My parents, happy practitioners of free love, didn’t teach me safety, or boundaries. But I am teaching myself these things. Out of love-the real stuff.
Carin Clevidence
When they fished the dead man out of the Rio Hondo we were surprised that he was yellow. One of the fishermen from the village saw him floating in the river; by the time they brought him to shore, at the far end of San Antonio where the houses gave way to jungle, most of the village had turned out to look. My mother, the only one with a camera, was asked to photograph the body. My little sister Shelly and I tagged along, but at the edge of the field we hung back, peering out from behind a banana tree. The man was naked. He’d died from machete wounds to the groin, a fact we learned much later. The men from the village carried the body past us on a sheet of canvas. He had been in the river long enough for the water to bleach him yellow. ‘Look at his ears,’ Shelly whispered. His ears were nearly gone, chewed away like his nose and his fingertips by the same fish that nibbled our feet when we played in the shallows.
They buried the yellow man in my uncle’s experimental field. Shelly and I had helped to plant corn there with our cousins, one of us making a hole with a stake, the other following behind and dropping in the kernels. Now the corn was up to our knees. The men dug a hole in an open corner of the field. They lowered the body into it on the canvas sheet. Some of the women crossed themselves. Then the men patted down the soil and marked the grave with a stick. Afterwards everyone milled around and exchanged theories about who the dead man was and what had happened. A drug deal gone bad, people thought. Maybe an escaped convict.
I was seven, Shelly five, when we spent five months in the village of San Antonio, Belize. The year was 1974. My mother had been there before, during the summers that Shelly and I spent with our father. My uncle, her older brother, was doing research on Mayan agriculture and she’d helped construct and plant his experimental raised- field system.
Little is conventional about my mother. Before I was a year old she’d taken me to a march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. By the time I was in second grade and Shelly in kindergarten, we’d stayed in a Canadian commune, an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tree house, a tepee and a white Dodge van named
