When I was eighteen I spent the summer trespassing into cow pastures, collecting psilocybin mushrooms from cow patties.
Only once did my friend Claudine – earth-mother Claudine with long hair that shimmered gold in the sun and silver in the moonlight – only once did she and I get caught. A farmer descended upon us, re-faced in the heat of an inland Florida day, swearing and threatening but unarmed and slow in his thick-soled farm boots.
We eighteen-year-olds were nimble, agile, scantily clad and fast. When we got back to my parents’ salmon pink Eldorado we dissolved into laughter so intense we cried. Claudine kept saying Stop, she’d pee her pants but neither of us could stifle our giggles.
We locked the doors and hightailed it back to town, where we made tea from the shrooms and our giggles took on new dimensions.
I don’t remember what it was like to be high on mushrooms. When I think of it, I see myself from the outside – five foot three, one hundred pounds soaking wet, which was most of the time that summer.
It was the last season before college and although I worked as a waitress at a diner serving breakfast and coffee to construction workers from six am until noon, all I remember are the days and nights on the beaches, dancing in bare feet on worn wood-planked floors of bars that Claudine and I assessed using fake ID’s that our friend Jessica obtained from mysterious friends of her Greek restaurant-owning father.
I met Jessica at the diner, where she’d been sent by her family to apprentice, to learn the restaurant business from the ground up, starting in the lowly position of breakfast waitress working for fifty-cent tips on the $2.99 egg and bacon weekday special.
Jessica was beautiful in the way neither Claudine nor I were. She was medium height with curves in the right places, full lips, lustrous curly black hair and a wicked laugh.
Claudine was taller, probably 5’8” with a solid, triangular body, small on top, widening into what another generation would have called good child-bearing hips, and stocky legs covered with fine blonde hair. By American beauty standards, Jessica should have been the girl the boys were all drooling over but that summer it was earth-mother Claudine who enthralled them.
Claudine worked in a boutique on the beach, next to the Wildflower, the town’s only organic, vegan-ish restaurant that served date smoothies, a formidably sweet and frosty defense against the ninety-degree heat and ninety-eight percent humidity.
I can’t count how many summer afternoons a group of us – Jessica, Davey, the ever eager Sammy and, occasionally, the gorgeous, curly-locked, sweet voiced Bobby Sugar – Bobby was the only one called by his full name because Bobby Sugar was his stage name when he sang at local honkytonks. Personally, I thought it was both a bit too on the nose and not quite right. He should have used a name like nectar or the center of a flower, because everyone was drawn to Bobby Sugar like bees to clover. Actually, that summer we, all of us, were like hummingbirds in our iridescence and inability to stop until we fell into torpor.
There were others in the group, boys who flitted in and out, Tommy and Joey and Paul but the center was Jessica and Davey and Sammy and I lounging in the Wildflower’s dim coolness.
The wide-planked floor and mismatched tables and chairs were a portal to a past before the air conditioned towers overtook the beaches, segmenting the sand with No Trespassing signs and flags marking the private from the public.
Maybe I’m mis-remembering. Maybe back then the beaches were not yet dominated by perpetually under-construction condos and the lavish homes of the few that absorbed and overran the small businesses selling real food and necessities rather than souvenirs and beachwear produced by children in faraway lands.
What I do remember was the feeling of otherness in the Wildflower, which was dark and wooden where other Florida architecture was light and glass, meant to optimize the sun, designed for winter visitors who escaped snow and sleet, craving light, not understanding that that which was
bright in February was unbearable in June through September. The Wildflower was designed for us, the locals who craved respite, for adolescents who arrived on bicycles and congregated in the empty months when the tourists had returned to their spring gardens and summer lawns.
It did not occur to me then that the appeal of the Wildflower was its proximity to the boutique, that the others, the boys, came not for the date shakes and the feel of smooth planks under their bare feet but to be casually near Claudine.
I don’t want to remember Claudine, who all the guys were at least half in love with. I don’t want to dwell on the attention she paid to the boy, or man, if you will, that I was with.
We were too cool for designations like boyfriends or girlfriends and too inexperienced to feel comfortable using words like lover, so Davey was the guy I was with until one night when we all went skinny dipping in a lake, which is odd, now that I think about it, since we lived near the beach and spent nights running in the sand and throwing ourselves into the Gulf.
No, wait, that was something I did alone after the night at the lake when everyone came back to our towels on the shore – everyone but Davey and Claudine.
If this were another kind of story, their bodies would have been found by the sheriff’s scuba divers, entangled in branches, maybe, or floating face down, Claudine’s beautiful long hair sodden and gray as the mud of the lake’s bottom.
Or maybe it was only she who would have been found and Davey would have run, on foot at first and later stealing a motorcycle while the officials hunted the teen-aged killer.
It would have been an accident. He hadn’t meant to – -- what? How does one accidentally kill and agile teen-aged girl in a lake?
No, it was murder. Claudine’s throat would show bruises that fit the hand prints of the guy I was supposed to be with. He would have gone on the run and the rest of us would have lived out the summer in mourning, arguing about Davey’s character and motives and why he had left Claudine floating face down if he hadn’t meant to kill her.
Would I have taken his side? Would I have told everyone that he was too good, too kind to hurt anyone, much less a friend?
But they weren’t friends, were they, Claudine and Davey? They were lovers, a word too sophisticated for our crowd but undeniable when they emerged hand in hand from the lake and neither looked my way as he wrapped a towel around her glistening, nimble body and she giggled, softly, not the way she had after we escaped the farmer.
They were a couple for the rest of the summer and I ran on the beach and swam alone. Running on the beach was the only release from the pain that was not heartbreak but teen-aged angst, a pain I had not previously known, as it had been buried under wild, shroom-laced parties fast boat rides on incoming storms, late night philosophy and friendship.
As I ran, I did not cry or scream to the gods or stars or whatever else inhabited the heavens. I wanted to cry. I wanted to rage, to feel that I’d been wronged.
I couldn’t. Couldn’t force tears to mingle with the Gulf’s salt. Couldn’t power my swim strokes with outrage, couldn’t feel righteous in my aloneness.
Even as a shallow eighteen-year-old I knew that I was leaving for college and Claudine and Davey were staying behind. Unlike Jessica’s parents, theirs did not have money to fund their education. Unlike me, they had neither the grades nor the test scores for scholarships.
I was leaving and they were staying. I couldn’t not acknowledge the poetry of their having emerged naked in the moonlight, a beautiful couple on the shore I left behind.
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