The Game ... First Time Sex: Part 22 - The High Sierra Music Festival

"Yeah, and you guys are gonna slip up one day in front of them if you keep kidding us this way," cautions Marcus.

"OK. Let's just go with the first explanation. We're staying with Tamara and Jadon," I say.

"OK. That issue is settled," says Donna.

"Speaking of fucking like a rock star," laughs Marcus.

"No more tonight," says Donna.

"Just checking," says Marcus and kisses Donna on her right cheek.

Donna drives us to Muir Beach. Dusk sets in, and we snuggle on a blanket watching the sunset and feeling the cool ocean breeze blow around our faces. As I look around at everyone on the beach, they have no idea that they are a brief part of our story and are being filed away in my memory. It's a snapshot for a lifetime of fantasies for sure. We enjoy a few quiet moments interspersed with our ideas about what to take to the festival.

The following day, the details or lack thereof are cleared with Marcus' and my parents who seem to be resigned to the fact that whatever we do is OK as long as Donna in charge. My parents think that camping will be good for me. They are environmentally-conscious, natural-foods-consuming parents. After explaining about the festival, they express a deep down desire for me to experience nature for five nights in a tent in order to develop a better sense of the wonders of the environment. With ten thousand people cramped together, loud music, parades, and parties, there is not much left of the natural outdoors, but if it satisfies my parents, I don't care what they think.

Marcus' parents, and especially his mom, express a similar desire to let him rough it in the woods, but they have slightly different motivations than my parents. They seem to think that all of the material offerings that they provide for him can be appreciated more if he lives like a gawd damn hunter-gather for five days. What the fuck? Do they think we're going to wear bear skins and shoot bows and arrows? Simply sleeping in a tent at a music festival doesn't provide experience for living off the land. It's not a trek into the outback. Just so he's able to go, it OK for his parents and mine to have a slightly distorted view of what the accommodations will actually be at the festival.

The cooler better be full of food or we better have plenty of money to buy stuff at the festival because with ten thousand people and music going eighteen hours a day, no one is leaving civilization behind. Marcus' and my parents want us to experience life without all of the usual conveniences, but there is going to be plenty of food vendors and there are plenty of showers. People can enjoy life without all of the conveniences as long as they can fuck. Isn't that why there is overpopulation in countries known for large numbers of impoverished people? What conveniences would I give up for Tonya? Everything, maybe except showers unless we lived in a tropical rain forest or near the beach.

Isn't that what drove the original hippies to live below their usual lifestyle? The hippie movement provided social and political change that resulted in lots of neat things that we incorporate into our present culture. Hippies changed politics, celebrated the first Earth day, changed attitudes about styles, music, and education. The best of all of the contributions that came from hippies, "free love" was the most exciting.

"Free love" meant fucking without guilt or commitment. Their generation was nurtured in the middle of the twentieth century and grounded deeply within a very prudish value system of the fifties. Geezus, watch some of the movies and T.V. programs that were produced in that decade. From the plots of the shows, you wonder how in the hell anyone ever had babies since they weren't allowed to fuck. While Elvis was destroying Frank Sinatra and the Big Band music of the previous two decades, hoop dresses on prom night were the fashion and served better than a chastity belt to keep guys from fucking the girls.

While Elvis altered teenage music, his contribution to social change is questionable. Who could fuck a girl draped in layers of shit tied to a hoola hoop at the bottom hem that came down to a girl's ankles? In the fifties, old people worried that Elvis was going to destroy the morals of the youth, but he didn't give instructions on how a guy's dick could possibly get close to a pussy that was enclosed inside of a hoop dress.

OK, maybe the girls didn't wear hoop dresses every night, but they did wear tight, very tight, mid-calf skirts in which their knees couldn't be spread more than a few inches apart. A guy had no hope of running his hand up one of those skirts and be able to get stick his finger in a pussy. Girls were taught to kiss with their knees clamped together. Guys were taught that they couldn't feel below at girl's waist. It would be easier for a guy to pry the jaws of an alligator open than run his hand up a tight skirt in between locked knees to feel a fifty's pussy.

Elvis' rotating pelvis was forbidden to be shown on T.V. Even though the teenage girls screamed for more, the older generation managed to hold off real social change, and attitudes toward sex didn't change until the next decade. Rumors were spread that girls getting caught fucking would tighten up their pussies so much that a guy got stuck. They would have to go to the hospital to be pried apart. The rumor was kept alive in order to put fear into the hearts of teenagers about what could happen if you had sex before marriage.

On T.V. the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky's bedroom on "I Love Lucy" are legendary for showing the attitudes toward sex at that time. If a bedroom was shown on T.V., it never showed a double bed due to uptight morals in that era. In Hollywood films, there were double beds, Doris Day never got fucked by Rock Hudson. Watching the two of them tease each other throughout an entire movie left the guys in the audience with blue balls and the girls frustrated. The girls got hot sensations but weren't allowed to be relieved by climaxing with a dick inside of their pussies. In the fifties you were allowed to get hot, but not fuck. It was a terrible era for teenagers. It took the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite circling the earth for the public to be able to stare at a rocket and not think of it as a phallic symbol, or worse, a dildo.

Then there was a character named Zelda from the T.V. show "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis." Zelda wanted to fuck Dobie, but he shunned her as he fantasized about Thalia played by the actor Tuesday Weld. Thalia was the proverbial teasing, blonde girl who never fucked until after she was married. Hell, she was so pure and untouchable that she probably didn't fuck for a year after she was married. She was the forbidden fruit, a girl to take home to mama, but an average guy like Dobie never had a shot at her. All of the teenage guys watching the show knew that her hymen was hopelessly intact and never touched. All of these tease-but-don't-touch stories set up attitudes that created frustration and guilt in the teenagers of that era. In time, the frustration and guilt associated with sex during that era were some of the ingredients that started a social revolution to overthrow the hypocritical attitudes that the culture displayed.

These actors were typical of the role models that the future hippies would rebel against. Propaganda in stories can't hold off the Adam-and-Eve impulse to fuck. After the pill became legal, there was a course correction. Teenagers had enough of that prudish bullshit from the past, and by the mid sixties they were ready to fuck themselves to death. When girls weren't worried about getting pregnant their knees started to relax, and they opened a wide path to their pussies. As the mini skirt became the style, guys found girls' pussies easily accessed. There were no diseases that couldn't be cured by penicillin, so fucking was guilt-free. Hippies brought us guilt-free love. Poor sweet Doris Day never got to feel a dick inside of her pussy, but her antithesis, Mia Farrow, showed everyone how to fuck in the movie, "Rosemary's Baby." So finally by the mid sixties, it was OK to fuck on screen and then to fuck your friends after the movie.

In addition to ditching the guilt of having sex, the hippies had the guilt of opulence. They felt guilty about having so much when so little is needed to survive. To get rid of the guilt of having too much, they endeavored to shun modern conveniences of the time. It's amusing looking back because compared to the average person in developed countries today, the hippies were not giving up much opulence, but their intentions were noble.

Maybe a few of their parents had microwaves, but no one had a cell phone, computers, or mega houses like today. There were one or maybe two phones in a house, and a two-bathroom house was an upgrade. A two-car family was emerging, but every 16-year-old wasn't given a car like is common today, fifty years later. Gas was about thirty pennies a gallon, bread was ten pennies a loaf, and the small houses in Levittown, New York were the norm. Houses in Marcus and my neighborhood have media rooms nearly as large as those houses. Still compared to the previous generation, hippies thought they were overly affluent and felt guilty because of it.

With as little as people had in the fifties compared to today, students felt guilty that their parents acquired material wealth, and to the their credit, we have Earth Day, recycling, extremely lower auto emissions, electric cars, and all types of environmentally friendly shit. We have "natural" foods. Who would have thought fifty years ago that food wouldn't be natural? Maybe a few science fiction writers and the book, "The Silent Spring, cautioned about human's negative effect on environment, but the notion was shunned by the average guy. We've come a long way when we have to label some foods as "natural." Adam and Even didn't worry about pesticides or genetically modified food when they ate the apples in the Garden of Eden.

Gluten-free, food allergies, diabetes, cholesterol, carcinogens, lactose intolerant, second-hand smoke, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and of course plain old calories are embedded in our minds thanks to radical changes in attitudes about our environment brought on by the hippies. You would think that we would all turn into hypochondriacs with all of the shit to worry about, but hell no, we just turn into vegens and buy all sorts of exercise equipment or join a gym. It that doesn't work, there are great plastic surgeons who will take all of your wrinkles away at the same time make you look like an alien. Geezus, it's a status symbol for the over seventy crowd to look like Joan Rivers.

So, all sorts of social and scientific shit started with the hippies, and they were political too. Their political protests started a rebellion, but young people always raise hell against the older generation for one issue or the other, so their political awareness wasn't unique or unexpected albeit historically noteworthy. Not to take away the sacrifices and political changes that the hippies made in the sixties, but other generations did that too. Being upset with your elders is a right of passage and isn't unique to any generation although each one thinks that they will end all of the problems in the world. Problems get solved with each generation, then the problem solvers grow old and create a new set of conflicts that their children will solve by rebelling.

Some people protest all of their lives and never get out of the adolescent rebellious stage. We need them because I see my elders in their late twenties becoming complacent once they start earning money. On the other hand, you wonder if they ever want to solve problems or if they just like raising hell. When I get to college I would like to be an intelligent hell-raiser and get a job working in the field called Critical Theory. Critical Theorists get paid for being grumpy and pissed off about everything. You wonder if they ever are pleasant enough to have sex. That doesn't sound like me, so it probably won't be my main area of study.

So you can get paid for protesting, but it's a problem if you want to get a job that allows you to get paid for fucking. I mean, there is no department of Fucking on a college campus and no Journal of Prostitution for papers to be published, but engaging in the research wouldn't be too bad. Maybe there is a related field. Political Science could be a study of prostitution since so many politicians engage in it one way or the other. That's a bit cynical. OK, it's very cynical, so just consider it a joke. Politics is always a sure way to ruin the mood when you're thinking about sex. So Political Science is not for me either. I've got a few years to decide, but it doesn't hurt to consider a variety of fields.

With the hippies' contributions to environmental awareness and political change noted, my favorite part of the movement is guilt-free fucking. Thank you hippies for that. I mean, they simply said to their rabbis, ministers, priests, preachers, teachers, and parents, fuck you. We're fucking, and we don't give a fuck. It's like they introduced the word fuck into our language. Maybe all of the pent up sexual desires in the fifties just burst out into protests and group sex in the sixties. There was a bit of lack of commitment, but humans tend to fall in love, and sex without love can be unfulfilling after a while for more people. So, I'm sure that hippies loved their partners.

Researching through the archives of the Village Voice Magazine in the late sixties, I find pages and pages of ads for parties that focus on group sex. Geezus, what a time to live. You didn't need a smart phone with streaming video, one thousand cable channels, a three hundred thousand dollar college education, and cloud computing to enjoy fucking after the hippies decided it was OK to fuck. So, fifty years later, here we are for better or worse, and I think it's for the better.

Donna, Marcus, Tonya, and I definitely have the hippies to thank for the last nine months of our lives together. Even with all of the freedom of speech and guiltless sex that our generation inherited from the social revolution, many kids my age still feel uncomfortable discussing things with our parents. It's a cliché, but some things never change. As I've stated before, we are genetically predisposed to not discuss or engage in sex with those that are very close to us as an evolutionary precaution to prevent inbreeding. Fuck evolution, it's just too yucky for me to talk to my parents in detail about how close Tonya and I are.

In the coming weeks we acquire sleeping bags, a cooler, flashlights, and a tent that will accommodate the four of us. I keep thinking about the Garry Shandling joke that went something like, 'Jews don't mind camping, they just have it catered.' Well, Marcus and Donna don't have a problem camping, and they don't need any catering. For me, all I care about is that there are plenty of showers. As the festival date approaches we feel well prepared, yet I still have the fear that our experience won't turn into the movie, "The Great Outdoors," with John Candy and Dan Aykroyd. As usual, my fears are unfounded. With food, water, and showers, it is reasonable to think that all we have to do is party, sleep in a tent, and fuck. It's about as close to camping as drinking water is to swimming.

So the week of the festival finally arrives, and it's time to leave. We start early. Before leaving Mill Valley, I check my email Galaxysign at hotmail dot com. Cogito ergo sum. By mid morning we're driving through Sacramento. We have time to kill, so we stop at the Indian Springs Vineyard in Nevada City. Jadon and Tamara buy bottles of Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay. As we continue toward Quincy, we stay within sight of Jadon and Tamara. Their plan is to get us in line in order to get a good spot for our camp. Once in Quincy, Jadon stops again to buy ice and get some last minute stuff at a store called The Sportsmen's Den.

Quincy's streets are flat and surrounded in the distance by beautiful mountains. Quincy looks like an old town. If it were in the mid-west, it would be a place to leave, but in California, it's a destination to escape from the craziness and congestion on the coast. It's a different world from the outside looking in and a provides a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere. Compared to Mill Valley, it is refreshingly unpretentious. If it weren't for the license plates and the mountains in the distance, you would think you were in a small, friendly, rural town in Tennessee.

When we arrive at the fairgrounds where the event is staged, it's sort of an organized chaos, and it reminds me of the historic Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889 where fifty thousand settlers lined up on the border and battled their way to claim their plots. With a projected attendance at the festival being only ten thousand and with several options for camping, it's not as bad as a land grab, but it's fun to see that human behavior hasn't changed over time even though we think that we are more sophisticated than our ancestors. We are hopelessly destined to be connected to the past for better or worse by simply being human.

Patterns noted, we can all be decoded if you read closely. We have four-day passes and plan to attend a couple of the after-hours venues. Those start at before midnight, and aren't included with the general admission tickets. We're forty-eight in line. I figure we'll be up twenty-three hours the first day and fucking the last hour. During the long wait, once again I check my email galaxysign at hotmail dot com and read comments on the previous stories. After setting up camp, we take a tour. There is an understood code if you read between the lines - that you must have fun. The atmosphere is full of excitement and anticipation of the events to come.

The mood is electric with all sorts of visual and audio stimuli surrounding us. Geezus, some of the camps have couches. It seems that the veterans of the festival really know how to camp it up. Yes, camping with a couch is just what Marcus' mom would approve. Get back to nature and sleep on a couch in the woods. Tamara and Jadon brought lawn chairs for all of us, and although our camp is modest, it's cozy. Tonya offers each of us a Hazelnut, her favorite nuts besides mine, and then passes a bag around for us to munch on. Jadon opens a bottle of wine that he bought during the drive, and we all take a sip, but Donna, Marcus, Tonya, and I end up drinking tea. It's not Fort Knox, but instead it is inviting as a villa in the country. Our mood is elevated to a ten, and I feel like I'm sitting on TNT ready to blast off because I'm so charged and ready to go.