For weeks I had been morbidly fascinated by this girl. She worked at Tower Records, you know one of those death rocker types with dyed black hair. This one had her head shaved all the way around about two inches above her ears with the rest of her hair stuck straight up. On the back of her head she had a two foot long tail with a small silver chain braided through it. She also had a nipple ring on her left breast, but of course I didn't know this yet.

She took me out to lunch one day and said she liked to have sex with metal-studded condoms. "Does that intrigue you?" she asked me. I didn't know what to say.

I had never put on a metal-studded condom before. I didn't know they existed, but she had one, and now I was putting it on, with her sprawled across the bed in front of me.

I got up the next morning and she was gone. We had slept at her place. It was small but with lots of character, interesting decorations and all, silver crosses dangling from everywhere, tie-dyed sheets on the walls and ceilings, music posters, and some of her own black and white photos blown up, a couple plants too--I knew she had a nurturing side. I hung out for a while thinking she might be back soon. After an hour I left and went back to school.

It was about 11 when I got back to my dorm. I didn't have a class until 1:15, so I figured I'd do some work. She was invading my head though, and I couldn't concentrate. The girls I had slept with before had all been so sterile and boxed up, more scared than excited but not knowing it. Jasmine, that's her name by the way, hadn't been like that at all. It had been kind of weird actually. I felt like I had been playing a part in her fantasy. What we had done wasn't really real. She was too relaxed; it was too pleasant, too perfect.

At 9:15 that night the phone rang. Jasmine said she was going to a club and asked me to come. So I got dressed and went.

I lay in bed alone thinking that we were a pretty unusual couple, if we even were a couple, which I couldn't tell. She wore her outrageousness. Purple lipstick, shaved head, etc. I guess mine was just in my head. When I looked in the mirror that night before bed, I saw that my lips were slightly purple. Some of her lipstick had rubbed off as we kissed. I mused about my own outrageousness becoming apparent to the world, if I was even an outrageous person. Maybe Jasmine was the first step in the expression of my own outrageousness. I imagined myself turning inside out in a B horror movie kind of sensibility. I saw purple seeping out of my head and onto my lips. Soon it would be dripping down my chin. Funny that outrageousness should be purple. I wonder what colors other qualities are. I guess scared is red, for blood, wounded. Pink must be unreality, living in the sunset, another world. What is it with girls and lipstick?

I got up for class at 8:00 the next morning. I had Greek classical architecture at 9:00. I immersed myself in Doric columns for an hour. I didn't think about Jasmine at all.

A week went by and I didn't call Jasmine and she didn't call me. Then I went over to her apartment and drew a smiley face on her door. That night she knocked softly at my door.

We went out for breakfast the next morning. We took my car, an old Honda. It was grey and the passenger door didn't shut all the way because it had been in an accident before I owned it. Actually the door did shut; it just didn't look like it from the outside because the metal was bent out where it should have been flush. It had a great old AM/FM radio too. The reception was always bad, but I kind of liked it like that. It sounded like my teachers, and anchorpeople on TV, and politicians, and newspapers, and MTV VJ's, and especially like stewardesses, excuse me, flight attendants, when they're telling you the safety features of your airplane... only the radio played music. When I revved the engine the speakers crackled.

Jasmine left her hand on the stick shift so I had to grab it every time I shifted. We didn't talk on the way to breakfast, just listened to the radio pretty loud.

I had coffee cake and an orange juice, fresh squeezed with lots of pulp and even little bits of seed floating around. Jasmine, a vegetarian of course, ordered some sort of tofu dish. I tried not to pay attention. We were eating at a little rinky-dink café called Corner Cornucopia or something like that. It had lots of long, stringy green plants hanging from planters all over the place, and the walls were covered with vivid jungle scenes.

The owner, or manager, or chief loiterer, or whatever she was, was in her late fifties, too old to have been the heart and soul of the sixties. She must have latched on after she became disenchanted with her own generation--sort of like a sixties groupie. Anyway she was pretty nice, very attentive at least. She wore forest green Birkenstocks, a long floral purple skirt, and had her gray hair pulled back in a pony tail that reached almost to the floor. She kept coming by to refill Jasmine's coffee and get me more water or another orange juice. She stopped by three times to make sure our food was OK and tried to strike up some small talk, which we did a fair job of quelling, you know sociable quelling, nothing offensive.

"Could I get you two anything else? No? You sure now? You really need healthy food to keep up your energy in times like these. I was reading just this morning where Pres. Mulrooney vetoed the Clean Drinking Water Bill. It amazes me that...," she had that slow, hippy, drugged out way of talking that made it seem like her mind worked slower than her mouth.

At this point I cut in, directing my gaze away from her and toward Jasmine, "Yeah, Jasmine, you know that reminds me of this article I read in Plutonium last week about...." Hippy-lady shuffled quietly off before I had even finished the sentence.

I guess she liked us because we were like the sixties of the nineties, at least in certain ways. Jasmine was the fringe element, and I was the student.

We finished eating, and I paid the bill at one of those old non-electronic cash registers, a quaint little rebellion against the passing of time, not quite an anachronism but soon to be, after this place goes out of business in a year or two. We left, saying bye to Sally, the sixties groupie, promising to return soon.

It was pretty sunny out as we left the Corner Cornucopia and walked back to the car. People were strolling amiably by, or so they appeared. We passed one couple with triplets in a triple baby carriage, and an old man with a beard who walked slowly and kept smiling at everyone and saying Merry Christmas. A little white dog with a leash trailing behind it followed him. The man was sort of musty-looking in an old green jacket and brown pants, but the dog looked good enough, frisky. I saw a store that had a bunch of glass globes on shelves in its window, so we stopped to look.

Inside there were more globes, some of them two feet in diameter, sitting on pedestals or in chairs. They were all different colors. Behind the globes on the walls were some random framed prints that added to the earthy-artsy feel of the place. The globes didn't have any bubbles in them; they were perfectly clear.

The proprieter came out in a minute. I asked her what the globes were for. She went to the counter and came back with a little pamphlet that explained all about the globes and where they came from.

The Chinese had been using them for thousands of years, she explained, as a central part of their meditation practices. Now they were making a big hit in the United States, after Nick Cagey, the movie star, started raving about their benefits on some talk show. They were called Sfears, because s- before a word in Italian denotes un- something. Hence un-fear. It was a name the American public had really latched onto. It also made a good pun. They were supposed to help alleviate fears and bring relaxation.

She told me to keep the pamphlet. She also said she was running meditation groups twice a week with instruction on how to use the globes, so I should come back if I had any interest. I thanked her patronizingly and laughed as I walked out the door.

"Well, so what's on the agenda, Jasmine?" I asked on our way to the car.

"Let's go to L.A.," she proposed and scrunched into my shoulder.

We hopped into the car, blasted the radio, and blazed down to my friend Bob's place of work. He worked in a lumber yard and had access to lots of great cutting tools. We squealed into the parking lot at Hank's Lumber and headed over to the chopping shack. Bob could usually be found there. He was busy power sawing something. He had clear goggles on and a big wad of tobacco in his cheek. Some tobacco juice was caught in the upper hairs of his goatee. He didn't notice us when we first walked in. Eventually, when he turned to spit, he saw my shoes. He didn't get much on them. He looked up and grinned widely at seeing me, shaking my hand vigorously. I introduced him to Jasmine. He looked at her and then looked back at me approvingly.

"How goes it, Sam?" he asked me. "You haven't been around in weeks. School bringing you down? Stealing all your time?"

"Well, sort of. Jasmine's been stealing my time too. I haven't really had a whole bunch of hanging out time though. How goes it with you?" I offered back.

"Aww, you know. Same stuff. Same job. Same wood. Same customers. Sort of got myself in a rut. Sometimes it feels like a rhythm though, and that's good."

"Listen, Bob. You got a chain saw I could borrow for a minute."

"Sure, what for? You got a gopher problem?"

"No, no, nothing like that. I just want to cut the roof off my car. Jasmine and I are going South, and we want a convertible."

"Oh, sure, I can help you out. As a matter of fact, I can even do it for you. We got a big cutter in the other building that would work great. Why don't you drive it in there. I'll be over in just a second."

Cruising down the One to L.A. in our new convertible, Jasmine and I were both pretty contented, smug with our individuality. That was one of the best days of my life. The sun glared overhead. Heat emanated from all parts of the car, but the ocean breeze kept us perfectly comfortable, more than comfortable.

Back where you came from