When I was about eighteen, I moved up to San Francisco to live with Leslie in the downstairs flat at 3043 Market in San Francisco. It is so long ago and hard to remember but I believe a woman named Sarah might have lived in the front room and had a baby. I think the father of the baby might have been named Cody or something like that. My room was separated from Sarah’s room by sliding pocket doors. My window was out on a light well. Leslie had the room in the back of the flat.

Leslie was very good to me but it was very stressful living with her. She was definitely the queen of the house. She could be pretty controlling and dominating everything and everyone around her but then, she was also paying most of the bills. She had known me for the longest of anyone else in the house and so I think she trusted me more than some of the others. I think I also brought out a bit of maternal instinct in her.

She treated me well. She took me to the musical, “Hair” at the Orpheum theater and we were within the first few rows. She brought a joint to smoke in the theater!

We used to go horseback riding regularly, all paid for by Leslie We would rent the horses in Half Moon Bay and along the coast to Ocean Beach and then back again. The ride would take all day.

I met my first lover, Jim A. while living in Leslie’s flat on Market street. It was a time of sexual experimentation and casual pairings. There might be several people in the same room having sex at the same time. It was purely sex for recreation. I guess you could even call them orgies. There were a lot of substances involved and due to the substances, I was able to carry on a sexual relationship with a woman comfortably.

I was having sex with a woman and Jim was having sex with a woman. One morning, he and his woman got into bed with the woman I was involved with and myself. The women were on top and Jim and I were having a conversation with each other about each others chest hair. It became obvious that Jim and I were more interested in each other than we were the women that were utilizing our erections. It wasn’t long before Jim invited me to his house and we started seeing each other without the women’s knowledge.

The video on this page shows the room in which I lived and a little of the flat. Eventually, Leslie would become a heroin addict and then kicked heroin, lost 100 pounds, married an alcoholic schoolteacher, lived in Italy for a while and then New Mexico and last I heard had liver cancer.