1964 - Venice Beach, CA

The story begins in a commune in California, circa 1964. It doesn’t matter exactly where in California, but it was somewhere near Los Angeles. A man and a woman met at a three-day party at the commune over the weekend. Nearly everyone at the party was on LSD, a popular drug among the hip, young, middle-class at that time. After twelve hours of outrageous psychedelic hallucinations, they finally returned to human form. When language was again an effective form of communication, he asked her for a date. She agreed, purely out of sexual attraction. Days later, he called her.

At first, she didn’t recognize the caller, but after he reminded her of the party, it all came back. “I would love to see you again!” she said. He didn’t have much money, so he invited her to his house. When she arrived, he welcomed her with a flourish and gestured towards his only chair in the middle of the room. It wasn’t an ugly room, but it was sparsely furnished—a few scraps of paper seemed to have blown in and rested near one of the walls. After plying her with some cheap, leftover wine, he recited poetry and showed her some drawings he was proud of. As twilight descended, he began to break his only chair into pieces. "What are you doing that for?" she asked. "It's getting dark and I don't have any electricity right now." He said. "Will you have dinner with me?" 

Thank you, Grok AI

All he had for dinner was hotdogs,  yellow mustard, and some stale white bread. They roasted the hotdogs in a large, empty fireplace and ate in silence.

She chewed her food slowly and, as she she ate, she fell in love with his face: short, muscular and dark-haired, he had a dangerous look. “He is both ugly and beautiful at the same time,” she thought. He reminded her of a long-deceased Italian artist. His poverty didn’t matter to her; she desired him and she would have him now. They made love on an old mattress on the floor, in the middle of the house’s only bedroom. Little did they know how deeply their futures would intertwine, for soon they would create a new life together.

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