Dear friend Diary,
I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you, but I really have been busy with my new job and school starting and all, and you still are my very dearest friend and closest confidant, even though I am really tuned in and receive well with Chris. We never get tired and she and I are two of the most popular girls at school, I know I look great, I’m still down at 103 pounds, and every time I get hungry or tired I just pop a Benny. We’ve got energy and vitality to spare, and clothes, like man. My hair is the greatest. I wash it in mayonnaise and it’s shining and soft enough to make anyone turn on.
I still haven’t met a guy I really dig, but that’s probably all right because I’m waiting for Roger.
Diary,
My parents are absolutely and positively going to make me blow my mind. I have to take Dexies to stay high at school and at work and on dates and to do my homework, then I have to take tranquilizers to bear up at home. Daddy thinks I’m blowing his image as the college dean. He even yelled at me at the table last night for saying “man.” He has his words when he wants to stress a point and that is all right, but let me say “man,” and you’d think I had committed the unpardonable sin.
Chris and I are about ready to cut out She has a friend in San Francisco who could help us get a job, and since we’ve both had experience in a boutique it shouldn’t be that hard. Besides her parents are about ready for a divorce. They do nothing but fight when they are together and she’s had it. At least I don’t have to put up with that.
Also Roger says he’s too busy to write much, which is an unlikely story. Like Chris says, “a man’s blood soon runs cold when there is no one around to warm it up.”
Last night was the night, friend! I finally smoked pot and it was even greater than I expected! Last night after work, Chris fixed me up with a college friend of hers who knew I’d been on acid, etc., but who wanted to turn me on to hash.
He told me not to expect to feel like I felt with liquor and I told him I’d never had more than champagne at birthday parties and leftovers from cocktail parties. We all got hilarious over that and Ted, Chris’s date, said that lots of kids never try booze, not only because it’s their parents’ thing, but because it’s a lot harder to get than pot. Ted said that when he first started experimenting he found he could steal a lot of money from his parents and they would never miss it, but let him take one swig out of any of their booze bottles and it was as though they had it measured to the ounce. Then Richie showed me how to smoke. And I’ve never even had a cigarette! He gave me a small orientation lecture, like I should listen for small things I wouldn’t ordinarily hear and just relax. At first I took too deep a drag and almost choked to death, so Richie told me to suck in openmouthed gulps to mix as much air in as possible. But that didn’t work too well either and after a while Ted gave up and brought out a hookah pipe. It seemed funny and exotic but at first I couldn’t get any smoke and I felt cheated because the other three were obviously stoned. But finally it started to work, just when I thought it never would, and I really began to feel happy and free as a bright canary chirping through the open, endless heavens. And I was so relaxed! I don’t think I’ve been that relaxed in my whole entire life! It was really beautiful. Later Rich brought a sheepskin rug out of his room and we began walking through the thickness of it and there was a sensation in my feet that was totally indescribable, a softness that enveloped my complete body, and quite suddenly I could hear the strange almost silent sound of the long silky hairs rubbing against each other and against my feet. It was a sound unsimilar to any I have ever heard, and I remember trying desperately to give a dissertation upon the phenomena of each individual hair having perfect pitch within itself. But of course I couldn’t; it was too perfect.
Then I picked up a salted peanut and noticed that nothing had ever tasted so salty before. It felt like being a child again and trying to swim in the Great Salt Lake. Only the peanut was even saltier! My liver and my spleen and my intestines were corroded with salt. I longed to taste a fresh peach or strawberry and have the flavor and sweetness and delectibleness of them consume me also. It was great and I began to laugh in a totally mad way. I was delighted that I was so different. Everyone in the whole universe was mad except me. I was the only sane and perfect being. Somewhere in my brain I remembered reading that a thousand years with man is as a day with the Lord and I had found the answer. I was even now in my new time length living the lives of a thousand men in the space of hours.
Later we were all very thirsty and dying for something sweet. So we walked to the ice cream shop, joking about the incredible high curbs and the unbelievable oddly shaped moon which kept changing shapes and colors. I don’t know if we were all really as high as we said we were, but it was fun. And in the restaurant, we joked and laughed as though the whole world and its secrets belonged to us alone. When Richie brought me home about midnight, my parents (who were both up) were very pleased with the nice, young, clean-cut gentlemanly young man I was going out with. They didn’t even complain about what time it was! Can you believe it? P.S. Richie gave me some joints to smoke when I’m alone and I want to be in heaven. Isn’t that nice, nice, nice!
Chris and I are thinking about quitting our jobs because it’s getting so that we don’t have any time for what we want to do.
I’m deeply in love with Richie, and Chris is in love with Ted, and we want to spend as much time with them as we can. The bitch is that none of us ever seem to have enough money, so Chris and I have both had to push a little pot. Of course we only sell to the kids who are heavy users and who would just buy it from someone else if they didn’t get it from us.
Ted and Richie are in college, and they have to work a lot harder than we do in high school so they don’t have the time to sell. And besides it’s a lot easier for guys to get busted than for girls. At first it was pretty hard to keep my cool around the Establishment, but since I’m now Richie’s chick all the way I have to do what I can to help him.
I convinced Rich that it would be easier to push acid than pot, at least we can put it on penny stamps or gum or life savers and carry them around with us without having the fuzz breathing down our necks or without having some idiot fink find out where or what our bag is.
Richie is so good, good, good to me and sex with him is like lightning and rainbows and springtime. I may be just chipping around with drugs, but I’m really hooked on that boy. We would do absolutely anything for each other. He’s going into medicine, and I’ve got to help him any way I can. It’s going to be a long hard pull but we’ll make it. Imagine eight or ten more years of school for him—and he’s already in his second year of college! Mom and Dad think he’s still in high school. I think I won’t go on to college. Dad will just curl up and die, but it’s more important for me to work and help Rich. As soon as I’m out of high school I’ll get a full time job and we’ll settle down. He’s been a straight A student but he says he’s slipping a little.
I really love that man. Oh, I really truly do! I can’t wait to get to him. He teases me and says I’m oversexed because I’ve been bugging him to let me try sex without being stoned first. He’s promised me he will. It will be almost like a new experience. I can hardly wait.
Richie and I never go anywhere. It’s almost a ritual for him to pick me up, and spend a few minutes with my parents and then rush over to the apartment he shares with Ted. I really wish we could be together stoned every night, but he only lets me come over when he restocks my acid supply and gives me enough grass and barbs to last me until I see him again. I know he’s studying very hard so I try to content myself with what he can give me of himself which seems to be getting less and less. Maybe I am oversexed, at least I seem to be a lot more interested in it than he is. But that’s only because he worries so about me. I wish he’d let me take the pill and I wish he didn’t have to work and study so hard. Oh, well, what I’ve got is so great I don’t know how I could even wish for anything more.