I’m Still Trying to Figure Out What It All Means — Part 7

Tassajara Revisited

During Lesley’s vacation in California that summer of ’83, I took her up to the Tassajara Zen Center, where I had stayed briefly as an acolyte in 1974.

To start with, we went to Carmel and, of course, paid homage at the Hog’s Breath Inn.

To get to Tassajara Hot Springs, take the Carmel Valley Road through Carmel Valley to Tassajara Road. This is a picturesque, winding dirt road (or at least it was in 1983) that takes some time to navigate. The California Coast Range is absolutely beautiful, so it is in no ways a boring drive. You can find some other dirt roads that bisect the Range that are worth exploring. This whole coastal area as far south as San Luis Obispo is exceptional. Make sure that you stay at the Madonna Inn there on your visit.

In any case, we got a motel near Carmel Valley and headed up in the hills for a day at the springs. You need to check the calendar. If you are not staying at the Zendo, the spa area of the resort is not always open to outsiders. At this time, it was, and we enjoyed a lovely afternoon bathing nude, enjoying the sauna, which is built directly over a vent in the ground through which the steam rises. Lesley was very comfortable in the mixed company and nothing of note happened.

About two months later, Donna and I decided to go camping in the area and to have a visit to the springs. I suggested this partly because it is gorgeous and partly because I wanted to see how she would react in a similar environment. After all, I didn’t know her as well as Les and was still feeling my way around our now serious relationship.

Somewhere up Tassajara road between Carmel Valley and the springs was a campsite with a single standing water pump in the middle of it. We pitched a tent on the slightly higher side of the campground. There were about six or seven other campsites taken.

On the 5th of July, everyone but one other couple had cleared out. Now, Donna had some mixed attitudes toward sex. On the one hand, she had very healthy appetites and loved getting fucked as much as I could possibly do it. On the other hand, she had an ambivalence that manifested itself in peculiar ways. One time when I was fucking her, she had one arm behind my head and pulling me towards her and at the same time had her other arm on my windpipe and was pushing me away from her.

She was sincerely modest and had been the Marian Model at her Catholic girl’s school, so it was no wonder that she had some disconnect between who she was and who she thought she was. So, to make a point, on this occasion I fucked the Marian Model on the ground in front of our tent in the middle of the afternoon. If the other couple who were at the campground had approached the pump, they would have seen us. There was just enough rise of ground so that if they stayed close to their tent, then there was no line of sight.

So, my Marian Model turned out to be another potentially flamboyant sexual exhibitionist!

I turned out to be a real one.

The next day, the 6th, the other couple left, so we had the campsite to ourselves. I wanted to clean up, so Donna gave me a sort of sponge bath at the pump. I was completely nude, and she was washing me when a group of cyclists rode into the camp. There was nowhere to go, so I just stood there and waited them out while they filled their water bottles at the pump. There was really no point in trying to be modest, and no one said a word. When they were done, they all rode off, and we continued my ablutions.

That night Donna and I were in our tent fucking and she, assuming that we had whatever complete privacy the woods provided, was being exceptionally voluble, in other words, loud. In response, we then heard a couple of men somewhere out in the woods, nearish but not too near, whooping and hollering in response.

I’ve always wondered exactly how far copulatory vocalism in humans carries. In baboons, it’s been documented up to about 400 yards. It’s probably about the same for humans, but unfortunately no one has ever studied it.

It was California, which is a place known to be full of lunatics, serial killers, axe murderers and such ilk so on hearing these yahoos yelling in response to her orgasms we both had immediate visions of them coming to our tent, killing me and gang raping her a la Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.

We threw on some clothes, jumped in her car and fled down the mountain in a panic. On the road to Carmel, we pulled into the first motel we came across and rented a room. The proprietor recognized me from two months before when I had stayed there with Lesley, and I guess having some kind of sense of humor put us in the same room!

Once we settled down, we resumed copulating, which seemed to produce a pretty negative reaction from the geriatric couple in the next room.

In any case, the postscript to all of this was that Donna and I got married about three months later and still are as of this writing, despite a number of ups and downs.

Lesley and I remained friends for a number of years. Donna said, “She doesn’t love you, but she respects you”.

When I told Lesley this, she said, “How very astute”.

The last encounter I had with Lesley was about twelve years later at the time that I orchestrated the back-to-back re-creation of my sexual experience with her and Kate, as described in Part 2.

On this occasion, Lesley asked me to get her pregnant, talked some gobbledygook about mucus plugs and body temperature, and promised that she could trick her husband into believing that it was his. This did not strike me as a particularly good idea and one that would, of course, never work out as she represented.

There was one last thing that astounded me about this incident. Years later, she could still recall and recount the exact date of her adultery, so it seems to have made quite the impression on her. However, at some point a few years ago she defriended me on Facebook, so I guess that we’re now officially finished.

When I told Kate about the back-to-back sexual experiences with her and Lesley that I had had in 1979 and then again in 1991, she said in her voice, “I still love you”. And then in her mother’s voice, “I hope you enjoyed yourself”.

Mark drifted off at some point, never to be heard from again, so the only abiding reminder of that extraordinary summer is Donna.

When Donna recounted my, Mark and Lesley’s sexual adventure to her Jewish boyfriend that she claimed she would never leave (Peter), he said. “I knew that the Prots were having all the fun”.

A couple of months after Lesley’s visit, when things had settled down, she said to me in reference to her having sex with both Mark and me on the same night, “I’m still trying to figure out what it all means”.

I said, “Les, all that it means is that like almost every woman on the face of the planet, you’re capable of enjoying sexual pleasure from two men. Don’t try to over think it.”

And as for me, yeah, I’m still trying to figure out what it all means as well.

Find all chapters here.