The Art of Sleeping after a Good Romp in the Hay

A teenage memory...

At 75 years old, which I just turned on March 17th, I am now at the age where sleep is more important than sex, and affection is more important than…well…sex, again! Perhaps sleep has always been, but nature didn’t plan it that way. Our youthful bodies are so ravenous to fuck that we can stay up all night and the following day if we’re getting lucky! I know! But that’s a different story. Fortunately for me, at sixteen, when I told my mother that I planned to make love with my first boyfriend, Jay, who I was sure I was going to marry, have children with, and live with for the rest of my life, she was wise enough to get me on the pill.

I was still in high school during the 6 months Jay and I were together. Today, 6 months seems like the tiniest amount of time, but back then, 6 months was an eternity. I met him in a darkened living room, at a friend’s party, a girl I went to summer camp with who lived in Hollywood, her parents were part of the movie industry. He was making out with a girl on a couch and I was stoned on Romilar Cough Syrup! His afro blew my mind. I’d never seen one. I sat next to them on the couch and played with his hair. That’s how we met. He must have given me his phone number because the next scene I remember is sitting next to his bed while he was cleaning a lid of pot, separating out the seeds in the top of a shoe box. That night we made out but I insisted we couldn’t go any farther unless we were going steady! What a naive and sweet girl I was! It took 3 of the six months we were together before I went all the way with him in one of the double garages of the Gentle Soul House, which he’s just moved into and made into his bedroom. A member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band lived in the other side.

The Gentle Soul house was a mansion on Marmont Lane, across the street from the Château Marmont, one of the most famous and iconic hotels in Hollywood. I’ve driven by it over the years, and it looks the same, but smaller than in my memories. It had been rented for the Gentle Soul band by Columbia Records. They were in the process of making a record with Terry Melcher, their producer. The mansion was large, two-stories with a sunken living room where hippie kids and those of us living or staying there would often lay around on the floor at night, stoned, listening to records. The front door opened onto a view of the Chateau Marmont. At all hours of the day or night, we could hear, when we could hear anything over the music pouring out of our own house, someone playing the grand piano from the great room of the Chateau. I remember my mother and grandmother coming to that front door to implore me to come home. They were so worried about me. Rightly, so. I was having fun!

Inside the Gentle Soul House slept all the musicians from the Gentle Soul Band, each in a different room. Then there was Jackson Browne, a 17-year-old musician who slept in the den, my boyfriend, Jay, and the Nitty Gritty guy in the renovated garages, a fabulous gay guy named Wendy slept with whom and wherever he wanted, and there were always other musician friends, girlfriends, and a woman named Bobbie, a super tall, thin, black woman with a shaved head who I remember for being so mysterious. And there was Pamela Polland, leader of the band and the reigning Queen of the house. I’ve written how witnessing her standing at night in her silk kimono in the kitchen, eating a bowl of her perfectly cooked brown rice with chopsticks, is one of my most embossed memories of my teen years, when I slept overnight there with Jay.

It was in the Gentle Soul House that I took my first acid trip and made love for the first time, and had my heart broken for the first time, and stayed up all night on the foot of Jackson’s bed, who years later would make an album of all the songs he was practicing that night, and who would be a lover of mine in those days of “love the one you’re with.”

But, to get back to the point of this post — and to explain why I felt compelled to write about sleep… when I woke up this morning, I thought about Jackson, whom I recently had lunch with, and had just texted last night. I was remembering back to those few years after Jay, when I was sleeping around with guys I was dating or just guys I hooked up with. I have to admit there weren’t that many, but the ones I remember were pretty amazing musicians. Sadly, I do not remember much about the sex, except that I really wanted it. I wanted to be wanted. But mostly I don’t recall what sex felt like. It usually happened so fast. I recall some great encounters, like when Jackson and I made love at the top of the fire escape at the Santa Monica Civic, while the Mad Dogs were on stage below us. This was one of the best times. I must preferred making love in unusual places, like closets, or showers, when we’d get back to having a day or night together, doing something else, not in bed, about to go to sleep.

Mostly, what I remember about sex from my youth was that if I spent all night with someone, I would lie awake for hours afterwards. I couldn’t just fall asleep after it was over. The guys never had trouble. They’d fall asleep immediately after cumming, those rascals — but me, I would just lay there almost unable to breath normally, my breath so shallow, my heart pounding, not wanting to move. I lay there longing for the urgency those boys had to have me to melt into affection afterwards, but they were dead to the world. It was as if I owned them until they climaxed… They seemed desperate, then they were done. I had the worst night’s sleep with those lovers, like they were mine and then suddenly not, fast as a shot from a gun. I would be left feeling lost at sea. I’m sure I didn’t orgasm with any of them, or if I did, I don’t remember it. I remember good feelings, but not the full meal deal. I’m sure they didn’t know anything about the clitoris. I did. For sure. I’d been masturbating since I was 13 with a vibrator and knew exactly where the pressure would be relieved, and how good it felt. It was like secret fuel. I’d give myself dozens of orgasms alone in my own bed. But with the guys, I was too shy to tell them what to do, where to touch, or ask them for anything. Why? I don’t know ——well, that’s blatantly not true, I do know why, now, but I didn’t know back then.

The 1970s brought the dawning of the next level of feminist liberation. I began to frequent the Women’s Building, in LA, meeting women like Kate Millet and Judy Chicago… It took me moving to France for most of the 70s before I had built up the knowledge imparted by these women and so many others as to the story of sexism. It took reading authors and meeting strong women who taught me to strengthen my voice and insist on my agency in matters of the body and the heart. What my girlhood missed was feeling loved.

Oh, I did know love from Jay, and I knew a kind of love from Jackson, enough for us to still remember each other with love, but mostly my soft heart longed for something so much more, something that later, as I grew up, I insisted on. But those teen years, those 1960s years— they were wild and free, and I would not change what I got to live through, do and be, for anything in the world.