"Yew bet!" I said.

Rudnick's girlfriend was Juliet Miliken. "Julie's roommate is Harriett Hiland", he explained.

We walked the few blocks to Julie and Harriett's apartment. Harriett and Julie had been roommates in college and were again, now a few years later.

Julie answered the door. Harriett was there, too. She was a tall puffy- lipped, wasp-waisted, amply bottomed sultry blond, . Perfectly scrumptious, I thought. Yummy!

Harriett, a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, was freelance editing Demolition Age, a trade journal for the demolition business. She was a writer, an editor and a crackerjack photographer. She was a working journalist and would mine income wherever her talent would take her.

Wandering abroad immediately following graduation at Northwestern University, she toured Europe and ended up working at an English-language daily newspaper in Beirut. While there she simultaneously juggled a Christian boyfriend and a Muslim boyfriend, so she had a fairly intimate idea of what the cultural and religious turmoil was about in Lebanon. The civil war broke out and the Christians and the Muslims started murdering each other with gusto and heavy weaponry.

But the newspaper had to get out and, even as incoming shells whizzed and blasted around them. Harriett and her colleagues would lie on the floor in order to escape harm while preparing the paper for the presses.

Because the airport was closed due to shelling and because open urban warfare rampaged in the streets she was stuck in the war zone for a time.

 

But now she was in Chicago, and after two dates it didn't seem to me like we were getting any closer to the bedroom. She regarded me as the pig from Playboy who was already getting laid way too much.

It was 1978 and I was art directing at Playboy. Harriett and I were at the beginning of what we would be.

She mistrusted me a bit. She believed that all I really wanted from her was pussy. There was, of course some truth to that. But as it turned out I really wanted so much more.

On our first date we went to a bar that was hardly bigger than a closet, jammed shoulder to jowl with sotted cosmopolitans. The bartender was a tough-looking dyke.

Not very long into the evening, the smokey closeness of the joint overcame me. I passed out and fainted dead away.

Harriett, having survived the civil war in Beirut, was cooly indifferent toward the trivial matter of having a date keel over in a saloon. Her reaction was to prop me up against the bar (maybe no one would notice) and continue drinking as if nothing were amiss. Unfortunately I slid to the floor, unconscious. I woke up with the dyke bartender straddling my chest with her hand in my mouth, roughly clawing my tongue out to prevent me from swallowing it. She obviously had experience in these matters, and enjoyed her work. She left scars. And the jam-packed urbanites continued getting their drink on, barely noticing the life and death melodrama at their feet. After I was revived we had a few more beers and happily went on our way.

On our second date we went to a Mafia-run restaurant and lounge staffed by off-duty Chicago cops. It was a real ring-ding-ding joint. Italian food and a house band that only performed Sinatra covers. The bartenders, waiters, expediters, bouncers and janitorial staff were all cops of Italian descent. The bartenders and waiters were hostile and aggressive. Y' know, like cops.

I recognized the guy tending bar who giving orders and appeared to be the manager. I said "Hi Richie. Howzit goin'?"

Richie was the boyfriend of Candy Collins, a bunny at the Chicago Playboy Club, a friend of mine. I'd met him briefly a few years earlier at his and Candy's apartment on the Southwest side. He totally didn't remember who I was and I wasn't about to clue him in. He kind of grunted in my direction and looked at me with intense suspicion. Cops and Wise Guys hate being recognized, especially if they can't place the one who's recognized them.

As we were leaving I had to grab Harriett's arm and pull her out of the way of an angry cop with a broom who'd been assigned sweep-up duty. He was coming up fast behind us and if I hadn't jerked her out of his path, she surely would have been run over.

For our third date we went to the Museum of Holography. We were anxious to view the new visual technology, but it was a disappointment. We salvaged the evening by drinking tequila and eating brain tacos at the Rose of Mexico on Rush street. I managed to stay conscious this time.

It was late when we returned to Harriett's apartment. Julie was asleep in her room.

We plopped down on the sofa. There was a small instrument case beside the couch.

"Saxophone?" I asked. I opened the case.

Harriett said "It's Julie's. From high-school."

I assembled the alto sax, applied some lubricant to the cork, sucked on a fresh #2 reed to get it nice and moist, screwed the reed into the mouthpiece, jammed the mouthpiece onto the neck and connected the neck into the body of the horn.

I went up and down the scale. There were air leaks on some of the pads. It squawked and squeaked and pretty much missed every other note.

I screeched through a few bars of "I'm in the Mood For Love", advancing a suggestion to Harriett by my selection of the tune.

My performance woke up Julie who stumbled in, bleary-eyed and sat with us in the living room. After awhile Harriett and I went into her room, rolled around on her bed and had sex (I guess my serenade paid off), fell asleep together and woke up and fucked again in the morning before she went about her demolition editing chores. I walked back down Rush street to Walton and back to the Playboy building.

After we'd been dating for awhile Harriett was hired as a photo editor at Associated Press. And before she started work we took the time to celebrate her new job.

My friend, Jay Lynch had an enterprising girlfriend named Lisa. Lisa was a chemist and, applying a little practical knowledge from her avocation, she'd grown some psilocybin mushrooms that she was willing to share.

I had a significant discount at the Playboy Resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. So we grabbed a bag of 'shrooms from Lisa and headed to Lake Geneva for a weekend of fun

As we were checking in, in line in front of us at the desk was Grace Slick and Paul Kantor. Their room wasn't ready and Grace was seriously pissed off about it. She and the band members stormed off to the gym in search of a workout while their rooms were being prepared. We didn't see them again for the rest of our stay, but we regarded them as positive omens. And we went to our room in search of a more psychoactive workout.

We gobbled down some of the mushrooms and fucked. Then I sat out on the balcony looking out onto nature.

As if I were in an early Disney animated film, rabbits, squirrels, butterflies and birds began approaching me, landing at my fingertips and talking to me. They were welcoming us, telling me what a cool place Lake Geneva was and encouraging us to have a great time while we were visiting.

As night descended and a full moon rose in the sky I suggested to Harriett "Let's go steal a golf cart."

She said "Yeah!"

We walked alongside the building, locked together heading toward the golf course, happy larceny on our minds. We passed by the bar area and immediately the festive cheerfulness beguiled our susceptible brains and drew us into the cordial fray.

We went inside. The place was packed and noisy, teeming with cheerful inebriation. We were blanketed by the happy revelry. It nourished our fervidly receptive consciousness.

A young businessman was sitting with an oriental gentleman. The Asian got up and left. I took his space. Harriett crammed in next to me.

"Who was that guy?" I asked the young businessman. "He wasn't a Moonie was he?" I demanded as I lit a cigarette.

A palm reader was working the room for tips. She came to me and looked at my chewed and bitten cuticles and then flipped my hand over, traced my life-line and said "You are very talented. Creative."

Then she said "You'd better stop smoking."

I'd been a smoker for 17 years. I'd tried to quit the habit several times and had failed.

But immediately after the palm reader delivered her admonition I put out my cigarette, gave away the pack in my pocket, and I haven't smoked a cigarette since then.

Clearly, because of the psychoactive nature of the mushrooms, my mind was open and susceptible to the idea. It was like a post- hypnotic suggestion.

So I quit smoking nicotine, a legal (deadly) drug, with the help of an illegal (benign) substance. I quit throughly without withdrawal or desire.

The businessman sitting next to me told me his wife was Japanese and he was in the import/export business.

He asked me "You don't have any weed, do you, Skip?"

I said "I have something much better!'"

We got him back to our room and fed him a handful of mushrooms.

After awhile we went outside. Fog rolled up and over the edge of the hollow, poured down the sides and filled the natural bowl with a diaphanous haze.

"This is what the Impressionists were talking about! It's like Monet! " the businessman exclaimed breathlessly, edging into the mist.

"This is how the Japanese understand the universe!" he reverently whispered as he started to twirl into the vapor.

The last I ever saw of him was as he disappeared, spinning and pirouetting into the nebulous dew. Calling out as he disappeared "Goodbye Skip."

I asked Harriett to move in with me. We lived together for a year and were married in 1979. Our marriage lasted twenty years, and together we produced three daughters.

But that's another story.