brownstone-birth-control

Others were not so lucky when it came to dropping acid. One of our little group began tripping alone and often. Over a few months she disintegrated into madness and ended up in a state psychiatric hospital where she stayed for about three months. When she came out she was pale and nervous and resentful of me. Her mother lived in the Midwest. She was German and had come to the U.S. after the War. When our friend was released from the hospital she began to blame World War II on the Jews.

About that time I left the farm and Lovegod and moved to New York. Our four pounds of pot was nearly gone. I was about to turn twenty-one. I still had not grown up and was still in the dark about sex. But not for long.

My new home was the second floor of a brownstone on East Eighteenth Street in New York City. From the back windows I could see the gardens behind the two rows of houses on Nineteenth and Eighteenth Streets. Birds flitted around all year long and I could see the seasons change with the leaves. I used the larger of the two bedrooms for a studio where I painted and made small constructions. I began to look around for a gallery to show my work. And I became involved with some musicians I had met during one of the parties at the chemist’s house.

One of the musicians and I became very close. After two years together, as I was walking out the door for the last time, I told him we were like poison oak and poison ivy – replace double hyphen with N dash] just too close to make a long term relationship work. By then I had grown up enough to know you need balance and counterbalance to make a marriage. We didn’t have it. We did have love. And THE PILL, which I relied on primarily because everyone said you could.

When I realized I had gotten pregnant on THE PILL, it also dawned on me that just because a bunch of experts say something is true, doesn’t guarantee anything. You pay your money and you take your chances. The flower children phrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” began to take on new meaning as I searched for a solution to my problem.