Cosmic Sugar: The Amorous Adventures of a Modern Mystic
By Leela Jones
()
About this ebook
Leela Jones, an in-demand professional psychic and self-professed slowly recovering hedonist, felt split in two between her desire for pleasure and her passion for soul growth. She chose Tantric and Taoist sexual and spiritual practices as her path to wholeness.
Cosmic Sugar takes you on her hilarious ride of excess that leads to the funhouse of wisdom. Through diving deeply into the river of life, Jones realized that the separate banks of Eros and Spirit became one at the ground of her being.
Her ongoing immersion in this flow creates a new archetype of the Divine Feminine which opens the heart into a space of boundless sweetness and joy. Cosmic Sugar blows the mind wide open by viscerally transmitting an expanded state of consciousness that can change your perspective on love relationships forever.
Leela Jones
Leela Jones is a spiritual teacher with a very private practice in New York City for over thirty years. She believes that the earth plane is one of many schools for soul growth and each lifetime is a different class. The body is the vehicle, desire the motivating force, experience the curriculum and refinement the lesson. You may contact the author at [email protected].
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Cosmic Sugar - Leela Jones
Copyright © 2008 by Leela Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any
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ISBN: 978-0-595-49228-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-595-61016-7 (ebk)
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Prelude
Introduction
PART I PRECOCITY
1 Setting the Tone
2 Braces and Boners
3 Lit’ Oscar Saves the Day
4 Infatuation
PART II LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE
5 Chapel in the Pines
6 New York, New York
PART III FINDING IT
7 Meeting My Soulmate
8 On the Run
9 The Real Adventure Begins
10 Virginia Beach
11 The True Nature of Our Interchange
12 Survival Mode
13 Confusion
14 Busted Again
15 The Prison Years
PART IV THE ROARING TWENTIES
16 The Zen of Eating and Fucking
17 Perfect Balance
18 The Next Level
19 Unraveling
20 Geographical Cure
21 The Back-up Plan
22 Slip-Sliding Away
23 No Edges
24 Drifting Through Italy
25 Intermezzo in Portugal
26 Prelude to a Bottom
27 One Is the Loneliest Number
28 Spiralling Down
PART v THE ASSASSIN AND THE SOCIOPATH
29 Sobriety My Way
30 The Assassin—Phase I
31 I Put a Spell on You
32 Surrendering My Will
33 Breakup
34 The Readings Begin Again
35 The Retired Assassin—Phase Ii: The Big Split
36 Karmic Marriage in Hell: A Case
37 Untying the Knot
38 The Assassin—Phase III: Taking It to the Limit
39 Looking Through the Eyes of Erotic Love
40 Life as Theater in the Round
PART VI ONE DOOR CLOSES… AND ANOTHER OPENS
41 Celibacy Sucks—But You Get a Lot of Work Done
42 Spring Fling
43 When Time Falls Away
44 What Was I Thinking?
45 The Concubine Chronicles
46 Buddha’s Delight
PART VII WEARING MY LOVE LIKE HEAVEN
47 Soul Meeting—California Style
48 Soul Meltdown—New York Style
49 The First Cut Is the Deepest
50 Sedona
51 The One Who Got Away—and the One Who Didn’t
52 Being in Heaven All the Time
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD: Like a Circle ina Spiral
The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility
for them.
I have changed all the names and identifying characteristics of anyone in this book who might be embarrassed or otherwise hurt. I have done this in the hope of not incurring
any bad karma or lawsuits.
I have told my version of the truth of my life with as much clarity and 20/20 hindsight as it is possible for a psychic, with a blind spot in the romantic area. Of course, it is only my version. There is always their version and the version that is the objective
truth.
My primary intentions in writing this memoir are to entertain, enlighten and do no harm. If I have succeeded in the first two but not the last, I am truly sorry.
To the
BELOVED
in all of his guises
"Out of eternity
I turn my face to you
and into eternity…
we have been in
love that long."
RUMI
Prelude
I knew one day I would write about my sexual adventures. In my imagination, it would be when I was in my eighties. By that time, I presumed I could write my history with the amused detachment of one long past things sexual. In addition, it would not affect my reputation professionally and, even though I have changed all the names to protect the innocent,
time would also serve as a safeguard.
Close friends who have heard me recount tales of my exploits encouraged me repeatedly to write these stories down before, in the haze of memory, they lost their piquant freshness. I always resisted the temptation.
Now, in my forty-fifth year, at a time in my life where I am slowly approaching my peak, sexually as well as psychically, I have developed a near obsession with getting all of this down on paper. This is not a rational act. However, writer friends assure me that I should follow my muse and worry about the consequences later.
I am in the middle of writing my second nonfiction book in my field, have a steady private practice as a psychic and spiritual counselor, and yet recording this now is consuming almost all of my waking thoughts. So be it.
Leela Jones
December 1998
New York City
Introduction
Everyone comes into their life with a mission, an assignment, a soul purpose. Sometimes I like to joke about it, especially when I look around me. I see lots of people scurrying around without a clue as to what their sojourn on earth is really all about. I call this condition deep cover.
It’s very common. It means they’re on assignment—they’ve just forgotten what it is.
One of my functions is helping people remember why they’re here. Not every life is lived with the same intentions from the soul’s perspective. But most incarnations are for healing and learning on many different levels, usually with a specific karmic focus that permeates the life.
My desire in writing this book arose out of specific karmic themes that I am here to heal and bring into balance. My hope is that I will undergo a deeper healing of the split in my being by transmitting this information to you. Then I can move to the next level of my growth with more integration and wholeness.
My primary karmic split is between two series of lives. The first cycle in my reincarnational development is one in which I developed psychically and spiritually as a priestess, oracle, sage, seer, and prophet—to name a few. My primary bond was with the Higher Forces. I was either committed to a path of celibacy, or more commonly, utilized my sexual energies for healing or ritual as a vehicle for communion with the Divine. I had no personal relationships. All were trans-personal in their emotional nature as channels for spiritual union.
The other series of lives that created this split has to do with a cycle in which I have become overly fond of and attached to. You guessed it! This was a series of lives in which I developed along the second chakra. That is, lives primarily focused and lived through the expression of sensual, sexual and creative energies. I had such a good time in many of those lives—as a concubine, temple dancer, harem girl, hetaera and, my absolute favorite, a Brahmin courtesan—I developed what I have come to call a karmic rut.
My definition of a karmic rut is: any series of lives focused on a specific theme that has become so overly developed, no more growth potential is available there. This creates an imbalance. My experience with thousands of clients is that the majority of us have karmic ruts which we have become attached to for our identity.
We actually have to choose to come into an incarnation to specifically bottom out on our karmic ruts. The way it works is: first we need to fully activate our rut, which usually takes at least thirty to forty years, and then we need to consciously choose to move out of this way of being. It doesn’t matter how good we are at it or how enjoyable it is. Our attachment to any specific type of development for identity is a losing proposition once it has become stagnate. That is because the name of the game in the earth plane is growth. We are all actors on the great stage of life and learning to play new roles is the only way we can continuously expand.
Obviously, there are as many types of karmic ruts as there are types of soul development. We won’t even go into development in other dimensions in this book. Unfortunately, not everyone’s karmic rut is as pleasant as mine has been. In fact, most of the karmic ruts of clients I have worked with over the last thirty years have been decidedly less pleasurable than mine.
I have observed monk ruts, nun ruts, ascetic ruts, control freak ruts, pain in love ruts, overly mental ruts, warrior ruts, long-suffering martyr ruts (very popular). Shall I go on? I have seen power ruts, lack of power ruts, money ruts, poverty ruts, external focus ruts, lack of focus ruts. The list goes on and on, with an almost infinite variety of sub-ruts one can fall into.
One of my hopes in writing this memoir about my desire rut is to inspire others to get over their ruts, no matter how safe and cozy they’ve become. Many of us go to great lengths to rationalize our ruts. We decorate them, hang curtains, look around and exclaim, It’s not so bad!
I can promise you that there is no place like home, but, in the end, it can never be found in a rut. Most of us don’t even realize we’re in one until we fully activate it and then remember when we have that old déjà vu feeling of, Haven’t I done this all before?
Still, we usually need to repeat the pattern at least one more time to fully bottom out with conscious awareness. For those of us who are especially resistant to change (all bottoms have infinite trap-doors), we may have to keep repeating our karmic patterns until aversion fully sets in. But, sooner or later, in this life or the next, we will choose to go for the growth.
Then, we can, hopefully, get on with why we are really here and move to the next level of the game.
I’LL SHOW YOU MINE—IF YOU SHOW YOURSELF YOURS.
PART I
PRECOCITY
1
Setting the Tone
Energy is the currency that fuels this world. While I didn’t access my psychic energy until I was nineteen, and I didn’t access my sexual energy until I was a pre-teen, my earliest conscious memories, at age three, remind me of my first lessons in managing this currency.
My parents separated when I was three and my brother Phillip was seven. My mother, brother and I moved into a residence hotel. I spent my days with my mother who tried to keep me entertained on the toddler swings at a local park while my brother was at school. My mother was very emotionally distraught during this period. When she was pushing me on the swing, I felt as if she was trying to push me away from her because I was too much for her to handle.
Like most three-year-olds, I was a bundle of energy demanding constant attention. Nonetheless, I formed a very strong belief on that swing. If I was too much for my mother to handle, then I probably would always be too much for most people to handle if I let my full light shine. I decided right then that it would be better for me to spread my light around and not focus it too brightly on any one being for too long.
Not only did that decision inspire me to become extremely extroverted and very much of a social being as a coping mechanism, it also later influenced my impression that I am not monogamous by nature. If my energy was so forceful, so powerful, so yang (male) as a little girl, then I needed to take care of my resources skillfully so as not to alienate people. I also realized that I would have to take care of myself from then on, since I was more than my mother could handle. I became my own parent, as well as assuming a caretaking role with others. Over time, this became such a strong part of my identity, it was natural for me to be drawn to a helping profession.
That’s a lot to learn from a swing ride—especially since I still hold most of those beliefs to this day, although in a slightly more balanced and mature way. Now, I am more comfortable being introverted as well as outgoing, and I have magnetized many friends and lovers into my life over the years who can handle (more or less) my intensity.
Looking back with hindsight, which is always 20/20, I believe I was born to be intense and outgoing. I just used that experience as a swing-board
to activate and reinforce the basic karmic nature I came with—to help stabilize it as the foundation for my self-image early in life.
My next memory during this period was continually asking where daddy was and being informed that he was home fixing the plumbing. This seemed to make sense at the time as he was in the construction business.
One night, several months into my parent’s separation, I accidentally locked myself into the hotel bathroom and couldn’t get out. The lock seemed stuck. I cried and screamed until I wore myself out, sobbing on the white tile floor. My mother called my father, in addition to the hotel maintenance man, and after what seemed like an eternity, I was released from my prison.
The good news was that my father was there when I got out and, better yet, when I woke up in the morning, he had slept over in the same bed as my mother. Best of all, the next day we all moved back home and stayed together as a family unit for nine more years.
Wow! Talk about power. I could get what I wanted—in this case, Daddy. All I had to do was put a door
up between me and any male energy I wanted to draw to me—and pouf! Like magic, it has been working, most of the time, ever since. This was my first lesson in the feminine yin power of magnetic attraction.
2
Braces and Boners
I grew up in a silent household in Chicago. My parents led predominately and increasingly separate lives. We all dined at different times. My father, who owned his own company, rarely arrived home until several hours past a normal dinner hour for kids. He ate in the dining room with my mother in attendance. My brother and I ate in the kitchen at separate times because we bickered. Coming from an upper-middle-class Jewish background, we had a succession of black live-in maids, and I usually ate with one of them.
There was no casual nudity that I can remember in our home, which was a large, rather formal eleven-room pre-war apartment. There were no private or public displays of affection. I knew that I was loved, even if it was never expressed. I never remember being hugged or even touched. As an infant, I was bottle-fed in a stand, instead of being held.
When I was four years old, on one of my pre-school outings with an outfit called Busy Beaver Day Camp (believe it or not), I was instructed to strip down to my underpants to frolic in the kiddie pool/sprinkler at a local park. It was a very hot summer day. All of the other kids had bathing suits, but someone had neglected to pack one for me. The counselor, a good-looking young man in his twenties, tried to encourage me to strip and go play. But my sense of propriety was already well established. I informed him, That just wasn’t done.
Being a pretty tightly wound little kid was an excellent set-up for quite an uninhibited explosion when I finally did discover sex. But, even after I was completely unwound, when anything goes
became my motto in the bedroom, my four-year-old self still monitored any latent tendencies for exhibitionism by prohibiting any PDAs (public displays of affection) as something that wasn’t done.
In the meantime, I was a very cute, precocious little girl. I was petite for my age and almost looked like a china doll, from my coloring to my manner. While I was a tomboy until about the age of twelve, especially around my peers at play time, I seemed to like older men’s attention whenever possible.
From the ages of eight to fifteen, I was sent to overnight camp for eight weeks every summer. I remember enjoying sitting on male counselor’s laps, usually college boys, whenever I could and flirting with them. The rest of the time, I was off riding horses, doing gymnastics, or canoeing; I seemed to prefer non-team sports.
My father had taught me to say, Thank you,
when I received a compliment, and I did seem to get more than my fair share of attention and praise wherever I went. Therefore, by the time I was twelve and discovered boys my own age, I had developed a relatively strong and healthy ego structure and self-image.
Unfortunately, I also had a couple of things that were not in my favor in the attracting boys department:
I wore braces and eyeglasses. Worst of all, I was the smartest kid in my class, even smarter than all the boys. I had gotten off to a slow start academically, but picked up speed by age seven and then rapidly outstripped all my peers on standardized IQ tests with a reading level of twelfth grade. This made the teachers single me out for special educational opportunities.
While the other kids got to square-dance, I was sequestered with kids a couple of grades ahead of me doing advanced math and reading. I became a teacher’s pet, which I enjoyed, but I was also in danger of becoming a geek or even worse in those days, a bookworm.
I became very skillful at getting my needs met outside of the home, as nothing much was happening there in terms of emotional nourishment. By the age of ten, I had become best friends with the cutest, most popular girl in school, Marcie. When it came time for boy/girl parties and having a special boyfriend, I was in the perfect position to be invited to all the best parties and have my pick of boys, even if they were Marcie’s cast-offs or second choices.
We used to play spin the bottle at parties and other variations of games I used to invent. I seemed to be very creative at escalating the dirty
component of these games so they weren’t so innocent. At school, the day after these parties, all the boys would look at each other and point and laugh if their lips were cut, because it meant they had been kissing me at the party. My braces were a serious weapon—but I didn’t let that slow me down.
By the age of twelve I was still pre-pubescent and had no breasts at all. One of my boyfriends, while riding me on his handlebars, looked down my loose tanktop and yelled to the rest of the gang, „There‘s nothing there!" I was really embarrassed, especially since one of the girls in my circle, Carol, already had her period and was a 36D. My mother bought me a training bra to hide my shame. To make up for what I lacked in certain areas, I compensated in others—I didn‘t let it slow me down.
One time, just after my parents separated again and my mother started working as a secretary, I invited my boyfriend and two other couples
over to my house after school for an impromptu party. It quickly turned into a make-out session, with each couple occupying a different bedroom. Fully clothed, mind you, it was 1965, but pretty steamy nonetheless.
My mother arrived home early (or I lost track of the time), and she discovered my boyfriend lying on top of me in the master bedroom. She screamed. Couples flew out of other bedrooms. What are you running here, a bordello?!
She shrieked. Little did she know I was just getting warmed up—my hormones hadn’t even kicked in yet.
One of my girlfriends confided that my boyfriend Alan was bragging that whenever we kissed he got a boner.
I was so innocent and naive about male anatomy, I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about or even whether it was a compliment or not. I was too embarrassed to ask and reveal my ignorance; I didn’t find out what a boner was until I was fifteen. At least, by then, it was firsthand experience.
3
Lit’ Oscar Saves the Day
My pre-pubescence went on for another three and a half years, until I was almost sixteen. All my girlfriends had their periods by thirteen. I felt like a freak of nature. When I looked puberty up in the dictionary, it was defined as a purely physiological event. Adolescence, it said, had physical as well as psychological components. By that definition, I had a prolonged and crazy-making psychological adolescence, with minimal physical effects. This produced an interesting latency period for me.
My parents finally divorced. By the age of thirteen I was living alone with my mother in a smaller apartment in the same neighborhood I grew up in. My brother was away at college, and my father had quickly remarried. Emotionally, I was devastated by the divorce. I was mortally afraid it would disrupt my known and safe little universe—and it did. More importantly, I felt as if I had no say in this event; I was just informed of it and had absolutely no control over it.
My reaction to this experience of powerlessness was to make a decision. I decided to never let anyone get close to me again and, thereby, not risk getting hurt again. I shut the door to my heart and threw away the key. I didn’t even remember I had made this decision until I was in my late twenties. In the interim, I became consumed with allowing in only good feelings and especially pleasurable sensations. This initiated my budding identity as a hedonist, as well as my attempt to separate sensual pleasure from matters of the heart.
Around this time, I discovered that if I allowed a strong jet of water in the shower to hit my clit, at just the right angle with enough force for about ten or fifteen minutes, something amazing happened. I had an orgasm. Of course, being a complete sexual innocent, I didn’t know what I was having or what it was called. I only knew it was the best thing I had ever felt. I proceeded to do this whenever possible.
Within a very short period of time, I was getting completely waterlogged and my skin was looking decidedly prunish. Whenever my mother came looking for me, nine times out of ten, I was in the shower. I don’t know if my mother ever figured out what I was up to, but she did offer me the most amazing gift and shower substitute.
She gave me a vibrator and told me, If you hold it on your ‘thing,’ [my clitoris, I figured out] it will make you feel good and keep you out of trouble with boys until you’re ready.
That’s how my lifelong relationship with Lil’ Oscar, my beloved vibrator got started. My mother was right. Not only did it keep me out of trouble with boys until I was almost seventeen, Lil’ Oscar (or his descendants) has been my devoted friend ever since.
I developed orgasmic capabilities with Oscar that were absolutely mind-blowing. I could come up to twenty times in an evening—and I counted. With the addition of smoking grass, which I discovered at sixteen, I created an expanded perceptual and sensual personal universe for myself. When I had the munchies, I ate bananas studded with M&Ms while listening to Santana and the Beatles. I was living a teenager’s dream life—and this was only my private world.
In the outer world, I was transitioning in high school from being a very straight, sorority girl/cheerleader during my first two years of high school to a closet hedonist/hippie by my senior year. I was still hanging out with the smart popular crowd, but none of them smoked grass, so that became my secret vice. I smoked all day, every day, sneaking out between classes and at home in my room. Because my grades didn’t suffer, and I had a lot of friends, my mother chose not to notice.
I had visions on grass of a computerized universe, alternately and at times simultaneously, with visions of a cartoon or farcical universe. It all made perfect sense to me at the time. Stoned, my inner world was equally as real as the outer world.
During this latency period, I had a few minor boyfriends, periodic dates and one semi-major boyfriend my senior year. One incidence I remember, when I was fifteen, occurred after a homecoming dance with a new date. We went to my girlfriend Marcie’s house after the dance and proceeded to make-out in the den. I let him fondle my breasts under my training bra and immediately burst into hysterical sobs. What did I do? What did I do?
He cried out frantically. I couldn’t tell him exactly in any way that would have made sense to him. I only knew that letting him touch my breast was the beginning of the end for me, in terms of sexual innocence with boys. I could see and feel it coming. This was a very accurate premonition.
4
Infatuation
In addition to my private world with Oscar and grass and my school and social life, my absolutely favorite part of every year was spent at Camp Judea, a kosher camp for boys and girls in Northern Wisconsin. My father went to this camp in the 1930s, as did his four sisters. In my generation, to maintain the family tradition, not only did my brother and I go, but so did two of my first cousins.
For eight weeks every summer, I was in heaven. I could make mischief, get into trouble with my cohorts and let go of the good girl
persona I had at home. I wasn’t really a good girl at heart; it was just the only way I could get attention in my family. My brother had already co-opted my preferred identity as the bad one. He got attention by being anti-social and not actualizing his mental brilliance with good grades.
I cherished the freedom of being away from my parents, living in a cabin in the woods on a beautiful lake and playing at different activities all day. I could flower at camp. I loved being in nature, especially on the water, and I was naturally athletic in just about every sport. But, what I loved most of all, by the age of twelve, was hanging out in the evenings with Frankie.
Frankie was a twenty-year-old counselor who was in charge of the boys’ waterfront and a pre-med junior at Stanford. He looked like Frank Sinatra, with a tanned, perfectly lithe, muscular body which he always showed off in very tight, skimpy Speedo briefs. Best of all, he seemed to like hanging out with me as much as I did with him.
Every evening, we had free time after supper. I would go out on a little fishing boat with Frankie—just the two of us. This went on for three summers. We flirted up a storm. He told me he was going to wait until I grew up to marry me while I wondered what was making that big bulge in his bathing suit.
Finally, the last summer season of Camp Judea was upon us. After more than forty years it was going to be sold. I was fifteen, and it was the last year I could be a camper there anyway. My favorite pine tree, which I meditated under for seven years, was dying. But my romance with Frankie was just heating up.
In the middle of the night, I sneaked out of my cabin, flashlight in hand, and ran on a trail through the woods for a scary ten minutes until I hit the boys’ side of camp. I would tiptoe into Frankie’s cabin, past all his sleeping boys and crawl into bed with him in his small cubbyhole of a room.
The first few times, all we did was kiss. Then, I let him fondle me a little, above and below the waist, which was all very exciting and pleasurable in a dangerous sort of way. Being twenty-four by this time and having waited patiently for me to grow up, Frankie finally made his move. He relocated my hand under the covers and placed it on his erect member. This scared the shit out of me, so much that I jumped out of bed and ran like I was being chased, all the way back through the woods to my bunk on the other side of camp.
I couldn’t sleep all night. I had to figure out what to do with that huge