Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxv)

Outside of the 9 to 5 work world during the first two months of 1971, I can recall only two interesting encounters during the winter. The first interesting encounter was being visited one Saturday night by Michael (the only other guy in the neighborhood who ever hung out in the Village), a physically beautiful 16-year-old red-haired high school woman runaway from Baltimore and the hippie guy in his late teens with whom she had run away from Baltimore, before bumping into Michael—who told them that he knew of a pad in the Bronx where they could both crash for the night.

Michael still lived in the Bronx neighborhood with his mother, despite his hanging out in the Village. But his mother wasn’t the kind of mother who would allow Michael to invite hippies to crash there. So Michael really didn’t have his own place to serve as a crash pad that night and so he just brought the runaways to the door of my apartment.

Naturally, I agreed to let the teenage runaways from Baltimore stay for the night, since they seemed more hippie-love generation-types than just runaway teenage dopers who might be there to just rip you off. After sharing some joints with us, Michael soon left for his mother’s apartment to sleep there for the night, while I began to strum on my guitar, as the 16-year-old high school woman from Baltimore, her hippie teenage male companion and I began to all feel much more high.

The 16-year-old red-haired beauty seemed to have discovered that it felt good to embrace and kiss long-haired hippie young musicians like myself when she was stoned. So after she noticed I was strumming my guitar, she moved herself from the mattress where she was sitting with her hippie guy companion from Baltimore, sat down next to me on the floor, next to the mattress I was sitting on, took my guitar from my hands and began kissing and hugging me in a passionate, uninhibited way.

Feeling her firm young breasts pressed against me, her lips touching mine in an uninhibited stoned way and her long red hair in my hands as we embraced, quickly turned me on. But when she had finished making out with me for a few minutes and invited me to also sleep on the other mattress where she was going to sleep next to her hippie guy companion, I declined her invitation and indicated that I wasn’t into a threesome that night and would just sleep alone on another mattress on the floor.

After we all awoke late on Sunday morning, the two runaways went on their way to head back to the Village for the day and the beautiful red-haired 16-year-old runaway woman from Baltimore never returned to my apartment again. From the conversation I had with her in the morning, my impression was that she really had no job skills that would have enabled her to survive on the street on the Lower East Side or West Village in Manhattan for very long. And so I think I advised her and her hippie teenage traveling companion to take a bus back to Baltimore from the Port Authority that night, return to their parents and wait a few years before running away again. And I probably gave them a cash contribution for their return bus fare to Baltimore.

A folk love song, “When You Touched Me,” however, grew out of this encounter with the red-haired runaway, whose lyrics included the following:

“From Baltimore
You kissed me on the floor
Your hair so red…
“Cause when you touched me
It felt so good
And when you kissed me
I wished it would never end.”