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Show RIVER Dylan-Burroughs-Sartre induced bitterness somehow made her amazingly sexy. At eighteen, she'd left me burnt out and broken hearted, and I'd sworn that I'd never have anything more to do with her, but there I was on my nineteenth birthday, courting her in Berkeley to the sounds of "Nashville Skyline." And it worked, I swept her off her feet. I was burning so brightly that she could not resist my crazy charm. We made passionate, inexperienced young love (and there is nothing in creation like young, passionate love) and I felt sometimes that I was living in a dream. At nineteen Rosie was intensely blonde and wore her hair long and straight, parted down the middle. She was near-sighted and wore thick wire-framed glasses: behind the glasses, her blue eyes were focused and full of fire, but when she took them off she looked lost and vulnerable. She had high cheek bones and a roman nose: despite her German surname, she had a lot of Italian blood. What a combination. Rosie also had a lot of spunk. One evening when we were living together in Santa Cruz I made some disparaging remarks about the casserole she had cooked for dinner and she dumped a bowl of the stuff on my head. By this spring my friend Vince was living on marijuana and macaroni and he volunteered to join the river trip. Vince was a strange case. His father had raised him to play professional baseball. He was an excellent natural athlete, and it looked as if he were on his way to the major leagues until he lost most of the vision in one eye in a war-ball accident. Though Vince never had much of a jock mentality (he was, as events were to show, a very sensitive soul), he was victimized by it. Young American athletes learn that winning is everything, but life isn't a series of victories and defeats, if s just life. You don't have to win, you just have to persevere. Vince was driven to compete: by the time we graduated -46- |