The Love Children by Marylin French

me!”
    We were reading Antony and Cleopatra in junior English.
    â€œI am open to the universe!” I cried. Steve tried to hush me. He hugged me lightly, told me to calm down.
    But I pulled away from him and ran outside. I was burning up. I threw open my coat; I put my face up to the rain and tried to drink it. It was amazing how hard it was to get the drops to fall in your mouth.
    â€œJess! Jessamin! Stop!” Steve urged from the door. “Suppose a cop sees you!”
    I stopped. That remark had penetrated my haze. I turned to him proudly. “I am open to everything!” I announced, holding my wrists out in front of me for the cuffs.
    â€œYou idiot.” He laughed and grabbed me. He pulled me back inside and sat me down and sat next to me and kept stroking my forehead and uttering calming words, for a long time.
    He said, “No more mushrooms for you,” but after that I clamored to try everything Steve came up with. One time Bishop had some pills—God knows what they were—and I took them; I scrawled for hours in my notebook, poem after poem bubbling up into my head. Sometimes a whole group of us would take something together, and we’d compare visions. Everything looked so weird with the pills, it felt as if you were seeing the very bones of life, the skeleton under the surface. The trees looked like fingers drawn by Van Gogh; my own hand was a continent filled with ships and land and bodies of water. We would lie around in the gallery, everybody offering his or her picture. We were full of love for each other; we were adored babies in the laps of the gods.

    Over that winter and spring, we regularly experimented—that’s how we thought about it, as experimenting; we saw ourselves as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley. We took mescaline and acid, pills that made you soar. Some people took downers, just to see what they were like; I didn’t. We always smoked pot when we had it, and we almost always had it. It was easier to get than alcohol, which stores weren’t supposed to sell us, though some kids could get it. Bishop could always get beer and even whiskey from one of his older brothers’ friends or even his sister’s husband. He could take it out of the family liquor cabinet if he wanted. His family—well, the men in it (and it was mostly men)—believed in drinking. It was the best part of life for them.
    But most of us preferred drugs. And until the cops kicked us out of the gallery, what a time we had! We’d lie around on the floor in states of benign passivity. We were experimenting with altered moods, and our experiments made us broader, more tolerant, more generous people. That was what it meant to be part of the new generation; we were each a love child .
    We thought that we were a miracle generation born to create a new way of seeing and feeling, a different morality. We had the sense that for generations, for eons, maybe, people had thought war was a great thing, killing was heroic, and domination noble. But we knew that killing was awful, domination miserable for dominated and dominator, and war a horror. We were against the Vietnam War, yes, but also all war, all violence, and racism. We were convinced that if the people of the world took drugs instead of alcohol, and preferred peace to war, violence would disappear in a haze of well-being. It filled me with terror to think of Bishop or Steve or any of my friends having to go to the jungles of Vietnam with a gun, to kill or be killed. What mattered was connection: getting in touch with your feelings and with other people, seeing the beauty in other people, loving them. Relatedness.
We were fond of quoting E. M. Forster: “Only connect.” We were incredulous that anyone on earth would deny the truth of our ideas. We spoke in wonder of people who did, the over-thirty or over-forty generation. We couldn’t grasp their mentality. I couldn’t comprehend the men in the