But I couldn’t shake the feeling there was someone observing our scene, and as I looked toward the window that led onto the veranda, I saw the venetian-blind slats almost imperceptibly move.
Without being obvious and not saying a word, I casually climbed off David’s cock and walked to the bureau under the window, pretending to get something in a drawer.
When my hand was out of eye range, I took hold of the blind cord and yanked it open, and there, staring me in the face, were the startled eyes of the landlady’s forty-five-year-old spinster daughter. Her peroxide-blond hair was all matted in the perspiration on her forehead and she was blushing and flushing and was very embarrassed indeed.
“Madam,” I said to her, “would you please keep your nose out of private parties unless you are invited? Furthermore, I would be grateful if you do not shock the sweet old landlady by telling her what you have seen.”
Without saying a word, she hurried away along the veranda, and we all cracked up laughing. And that, more or less, was the reckless tone of my next few weeks with the band of vagabonds.
The boys were on “extended” vacation in Puerto Rico, living the best way they could, which was not always something their parents would approve of if they knew. They were all law-school graduates, except David, the dropout, who was a larcenist by nature and the biggest, horniest fuck of all.
But Hood was the one I liked the best emotionally. He was sensitive, intelligent, and from an aristocratic New Jersey family. Together we all lived like beach bums, wildly and sometimes childishly, but it was a good balance for the work I was doing twice daily.
In the mornings we would all go to the beach, pinch some chairs, fool around, then around four P.M. I would leave for my afternoon’s business and join the boys back at the house later for a relaxing orgy and a siesta.
If the landlady’s nosy daughter was still interested in our activities, she no longer showed it, and always made a point of darting out of sight whenever my band of “freak hippies” walked by.
However, one morning when I broke our regular routine of being absent from the house all day and ducked back to pick up my suntan lotion, I discovered that I was wrong.
As I climbed the wooden stairs, I could see the sandaled feet of the spinster daughter standing motionless beside my bed. “Oh, my God,” I thought, “the busybody old snoop has found our orgy pictures.” Then I remembered she had seen the live performance, so what the hell, let her have her kicks as long as the dear old landlady was not exposed to it.
But as I tiptoed barefoot into the room, I saw none other than the old lady herself holding our pictures up to the light and discussing our various positions as though she and her daughter were Masters and Johnson!
They were both so absorbed in the pornography that they didn’t hear me enter at first.
“Good morning, ladies,” I said., “Are you enjoying our happy snaps?”
They wheeled around, mouths open, dropped the pictures like hot coals into the open drawer, and slammed it shut.
“Madam,” I addressed myself to the daughter, “it is not enough that you snoop around things that don’t concern you, but you have to get an innocent old lady involved, too. You should be ashamed of yourself, you really should.”
They didn’t wait to hear any more, they just bowed their heads and hurried straight out of the room.
I was angry in a way, but at the same time grateful that pictures were the only thing they found, because stashed away in my pocketbooks, luggage lining, and even my passport were bundles of fifties, twenties, and tens, which represented most of my three months’ earnings.
I had already sent a substantial sum back to New York with a man named Larry, who has since become my permanent boyfriend. Nevertheless, it was a risky practice leaving so much money around, especially since the people I lived with weren’t what could exactly be called honest, particularly David.
To show you what he was like, in the nighttime we would all get dressed up, and he would take us to the most expensive restaurants in San Juan in a hot VW and pay for the multicourse banquets with stolen credit cards. If he could do something straight, he would reject it, because he got a great deal of genuine pleasure out of being crooked.
As the weeks went on, our behavior became more and more reckless and abandoned, and we would do almost anything that had an air of escapade about it, which is why one day David suggested we all get stoned on mescaline.
As I mentioned, I don’t use stimulants of any sort, not even coffee, so at first I was naturally scared. But David assured me everything would be all right, especially as we would all take a pill each together and the effects would last no longer than eight or nine hours.
David knew all about drugs – as well as turning on to them, he also pushed them on occasional trips to Miami – so we took his word for it.
It was a Friday morning when we went on our “trip.” We took the pills around noon as we left the guest house and in a “temporarily borrowed” Volkswagen drove to a small secluded beach ten minutes from San Juan.
By the time we arrived the pill had already started to work, and we piled out of the car onto the white-sand crescent and tore off all our clothes. Even Hood, the timid one, came out of his shell, and soon we were all rolling around in the sand near the water’s edge making love. Somebody tried to make Polaroid pictures of the scene, but the camera kept falling out of our hands, and after about two exposures it fell gurgling into the sea.
Then I remember wanting to have a pee, which I would normally be embarrassed to do with people around, unless it’s a freak scene and somebody wants to get peed on. But that day I was so abandoned I said, “Okay, baby, I’m going to pee.” I stood there naked doing it in front of the others while they were all stoned out of their heads, digging up the sand.
The whole scene was like standing apart and watching ourselves in a fast-action film, yet being involved at the same time. Colors became very vibrant. The sun was like a golden ball dangling above our heads, and the sea was like blue Jell-O oozing to shore and out again. We ran into the hills and made love with a background of palm trees threaded by a sandy road that we must have come along, which appeared to lead into a small village.
As we were freaking out and jumping around, a maroon car passed on the road, looking as if it were from a different world, but somehow very close, and inside was a Negro who looked out, waved, and drove on.
You don’t entirely lose your head on mescaline, and even though you’re stoned, you still know what’s happening. Pretty soon the same maroon car was back again, this time carrying three Negroes, all waving, and it went away again.
Five minutes later, or an hour – we cannot judge time anymore – the same car came along followed by a sightseeing bus full of Negroes all staring at those nude people jumping around out there.
The bus slowed, stopped, then took off again, but the three Negroes parked the maroon car near the palm trees and started wading through the water to us. As they got closer, I got this obsession that I wanted to see them jerking off. I had never made love with a black man, but I had heard the story that they are all huge. So I started indicating my desire by making the manual gesture, up and down, and indeed one of them took out his cock and started jerking off! Then the others started doing it, too.
Just then a bunch of schoolkids with their satchels on their backs appeared. The Negroes retreated into the bushes, so we began sucking and fucking again, and the children were walking backward looking at us with eyes like saucers.
From beneath the palm trees the Negroes started trying to hit us with coconuts, and this was the point we started to realize we should split. But by now we were so freaked out we could not control anything anymore.