7 - sex

Sacha was twenty-months old and being the independent type he was constantly wandering off wherever we were and keeping track of him was a fulltime task. We stopped in Hawaii and stayed with Randy and Cheryl. They had their baby in Los Angeles in February 1981 and named her Sephora then returned to Hawaii. All that I remember from that time is that I find it fascinating how we surface into one another’s lives.

Life seems so cyclic at times, and we have life-long partners that we seem to be in some sort of cosmic slow dance with and one moment we are on the dance floor together and another time we view one another from a distance and yet at other times we slip out of one another’s sphere. Our life-long partners could be people that we see at different times in our life even if we do not get heavily involved with them. It could be the grocer that we see a lot of for a while then we move on in the world and when we return there is the same person, and we get back on the dance floor. Well maybe not the grocer but someone like Randy is like that to me. I met him in 1968 in Laguna Beach, California, and then he got me into the Holy Order of Mans a year or more later, then I got him out of the Order in 1972, he watched me go back into HOOM in April 1974 in San Francisco, he visited me in Maryland in 1978 then we lived in the same place when I found I was with child in Hawaii and there was no room in the apartment and I slept in a tent in the backyard  and here we were together in 1982 with babies in hand.  We saw each other next in Eugene, Oregon in 1985 and again in 2003 in Syracuse, New York, and we went white-water rafting in Oregon in 2004 and he stayed at my home in Jersey City May 2009 and always we were the same people but in such different places in our lives. Now in March 2015 we wave and ‘like’ each other’s posts on Facebook.

Our moving in and out of each other’s lives has covered a span of forty-seven years and I do not know anyone else outside of my ninety-eight-year-old father that I have seen over such a long time. Though a few days, now it is June 2009, I have been having contact with Shane who I spent a lot of time within New Orleans and she was a friend of Randy’s and Dell’s. It is a bit of a startling revelation to get to fifty-six years old and realise that only a couple of people on the planet can give any evidence that you existed for any longer than the past few years.  We really do live life isolated from everyone else. It is impossible for anyone to know us fully even those who see us step in and out of their life. No one else in the world at any time of existence has had the same experiences and feelings or thoughts as I just as I can never fully feel or be what anyone else is because we are only a complete unit of experiences unto ourselves. Life is inherently lonely and we create friends and diversions such as lovers, world-views, movies, novels, this story and those illusionary friends whom we fancy understand us. Humans are a selfish lot no matter what the equation and even though we imagine others can witness life as we do, in reality no one comes close and anyone who behaves as if they do are manipulative frauds and we call them friends and lovers and partners out of desperation of being alone.  Just an hour ago, 26/02/2006 9:16 PM I received an email from Daniel after not hearing from him for many years. We had been in the Order together in Syracuse in 1975 and Baltimore in the late 1970s. I had seen him in 1985 with my children in tow, and with wife number two in 2002. The Internet no longer is cosmic – we can pop up in one-another’s life at any time.

The trip of 1982 yielded two events each having more profound effects than the other. Lesia’s father came with us and we visited some Russian or Ukrainian relatives along the way. We looked at tofu production in Los Angeles, Boston and Tennessee at the 1960s commune The Farm (http://www.thefarm.org/). I have no desire to live in a commune environment again but it was interesting to think that if I had continued with the hippie way of life I very well could have been living here. We visited my friend, Janet in Dallas Texas, whom I had stayed with a couple of years earlier when kidney stones had prevented me from any attempts at being intimate with her.

The first event, not as important as the second though probably on some levels it was, was that when we were at my father’s house in Clifton Park (my mother was in a nursing home in Schenectady) I began to telephone the twenty or so Bellinger’s in the phonebook. The third person I spoke with said she was married to my mother’s brother, Floyd. She had heard of me and told me that I had a brother (half-brother) and sister (half-sister). They had a different father than I. My brother was living in Hawaii and my sister was living in Albany, New York and my grandmother was nearby in Colonie. We were leaving on the day that I had made the connection about my birth family for the hippie commune, The Farm, in Tennessee and I had said I would speak with her when I returned in a week. When we returned I telephoned the same people, and spoke with my mother’s brother’s wife and she said she had no idea who I was talking about and that was the end of trying to find my birth family whilst on that trip. That was the beginning of locating my birth family from overseas and when I got back to Australia I sent a letter to the Rensselaer Social Services and told of my predicament of actually coming so close yet being so far from finding my family. The same person who had written me for years sent me a photocopy of the page of the Capital District Area phonebook with the list of Bellingers and on the top of the page wrote “it is the third one”. I still have that letter and page of the phonebook thirty years later.

Lesia and I had sex one time in 1982 and that was in Detroit when we stayed with some relatives of her family. I remember the moment well; I wanted to, having seen many attractive women in Detroit that day (go figure) and it led to the idea of maybe I could have a quickie, she didn’t care. Lesia said it was an OK time based on some lunar cycle thingy meaning she was not fertile and knowing that fate cannot strike the same couple twice I went for it and nine months later Leigh was born.

We had been back in South Australia for more than a month when Lesia realized that she was with child or some such creature. I mentioned the fact that we had sex once in the year and she was pregnant and she said that she was efficient. It was the story of our relationship right there, her efficiency versus the most basic of human interaction, love and nurturing. During her pregnancy there was a time when she thought she was going to have a miscarriage and that is the only day I remember of the time we were back in the last couple months of 1982 but there was no miscarriage and I believed back then that someone how we would sort it out and raise two humans who would be there for us in our old age.

Christmas  1982 Adelaide  with Sacha  and wife # 1

Christmas 1982 was done in Adelaide, South Australia with wife number one and Sacha and one more on the way.

8 – next > enter Leigh

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.