In the middle of a winter night, a cold wind whipped up the damp streets of the dark side of Long Beach, California, and pushed the dense fog off shore. I was just about to reach for a fifth of Jack Daniels and slip into a warm comfortable reclining chair and watch Easyriders for the eighth time, but the phone rang.
“They’re coming,” the voice said. “They know where you’re hiding out. Grab your shit and get out of town.” The phone went dead. We were having a problem with an expanding club, but that meant we were also experiencing additional heat from the Man.
I set the fifth of Jack back on the counter, and looked carefully out my window to the dark street. I was checking weather conditions and the vehicles parked down the street for anything new. I threw on my vest over a tattered sweatshirt and pulled on my worn cowboy boots.
Then I started to gather shotguns and a couple of revolvers including a .38 and a .45. I rounded up all the ammo I could muster and slipped it in a gym bag. I drove a strange looking International van at the time, and I loaded the stern door and jumped in the cab.
I hauled ass across Los Angeles through patches of fog as thick as mud and occasional sprinkles, until I hit the San Fernando Valley. I watched for following vehicles. The temperature started to drop as I rolled through another pass into Ventura County. Then I slipped off the freeway at 1:30 a.m. and down a couple of semi-up-scale neighborhoods to a gated condo complex, where I pressed her number code and the iron gate creaked open on cast steel wheels.
I slipped out of the LB ghetto across no-man’s land without being spotted, into a serene community, seemingly a world away from the outlaw streets of Long Beach. She met me at the door in a shear negligee, just a wisp of fine see-through fabric laced with silk over her wholesome blonde delicate form. There was something about that moment. Her soft pure warmth represented all the good in life against the backdrop of terror and brutal violence on the other side of town.
In contrast, I stood there bearded, long-haired, a grubby biker with grease under my fingernails, bruises and cuts on my face, from the last fist fight, holding two sawed-off pump shotguns, with a large .45 stainless revolver stuffed into my stained denims and another blued Smith and Weston .38 in my ratty leather vest pocket. And finally, a grubby faded gym bag full of boxes of ammo over my broad shoulder.
Jenny looked at me, her nipples hardening and her pristine eyes as bright as floodlights glistening in the moonlight. Her perfect ivory smile drenched me in a warm unpolluted glow. She looked as if she was a five-year-old and I was Santa Claus. She hugged me as if I was about to free her from five years as a sex slave, or free her from a world of middle-class doldrums and make her my sex slave. Who the hell knows—women.
Here warmth, tenderness, touch, and when I kissed the nape of her neck I could have melted into a pool of hot liquid butter over steaming pancakes. Again, I was hit with the dichotomy of life, the ultra soft purity of this woman against the backdrop of impending death at the hands of the weaponry in my possession.
To add to the surreal nature of this encounter, she turned on Jimmy Hendrix, and his Cry of Love track filled her well-kept living room, as I closed and locked her front door. As I turned, she stepped in front of me and dropped the remnants of the scant attire concealing her heavenly form. “Let me have that,” she said and took the stainless High Standard 12 Gauge shotgun from my grasp and pressed it to her supple body.
All hell broke loose. She took to the weapons like I took to her tits. The night went insane with sex and steel. I won’t go into the slippery details, but it was a night of contrasts and wild sex. I still start to breath hard just thinking about Jenny and the guns.
