Summer Lightning Speak memory! Or maybe, mutter memory! When ...

In London you could walk (and you surely still can) across Hyde Park as summer took hold and trip across couples coupling behind every shrub. Walk over to Green Park of an evening and you'd find members of Parliament or senior civil servants trolling for guardsmen. They nailed the assistant chief of Scotland Yard thus disporting back in the reign of George V, having intimate parleys with a guardsman. Someone visited the Monarch and found him brooding on the scandal, murmuring, "He had it in his hand, that's bad, that's bad."

I remember enjoying a perfectly ordinary social picnic with boon companions?this was after all in the Summer of Love, 1967?in Hyde Park, and Penny B and I found it imperative to seek privacy behind a rhododendron. For more or less instant replays with Penny I took to journeying down to Colchester on the train from London, a matter of a couple of hours.

One weekend I'd agreed to provide a sperm donation to an expensive doctor on Harley Street, whose aristocratic client was unable to provide his wife with the requisite heir. Dr. G gave me a test tube and said to be back at 10 a.m. Monday morning, advising that I would get my $100 on production of the test tube, which for maximal fertility potential, he counseled with doctorly sternness, should be filled early Monday morning. In the interests of self-same fertility he also stipulated I should refrain from sexual activity over the weekend.

I told Penny the news on arriving in Colchester. Incensed at her rival, the test tube, she seized me by the hand and headed for the bedroom. Monday morning found me hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, slumped on the early train back to London. Chances of swelling the ranks of the English upper classes seemed nil.

About an hour short of London, a young thing, beehive hair mounting to a perfect cone above her thickly mascaraed eyes, clambered aboard the train and provided the necessary pheromonic transfer. I hastened to the tiny lavatory, test tube at the ready. I figured another half hour on the train, a quick taxi ride to Harley Street, the exchange of test tube for cash and the rent check would be taken care of for the next three weeks. Life was cheap in Earl's Court in those days.

But I'd reckoned without British Rail. Fifteen minutes short of London the train came to a halt. A voice from the loudspeaker spoke of delays. It counseled patience. The young thing tended to her beehive. I thought of the waning vitality of my test tube, the possibility that Lady A would produce a wimpy little baronet, with her father the Earl barking gruffly, What's the matter with that boy? How would they know to put the blame on British Rail?

The minutes ticked away. At last the train shuddered forward. Into King's Cross it clattered. I dashed to the taxi line. "Drive to Harley Street. A life may depend on it!" Dr. G was waiting. As I entered his consulting room he barked into the phone, "It's here." Money changed hands and, yes, nine months later a bouncing lordlet embarked on the long trek of the upper classes, toward... Alas, his life was, I understand, a blighted one, and who knows, if it hadn't been for the scents of summer in Hyde Park, Penny, the rhododendron, Colchester, it might all have been different...

Speak, or mumble, memory once more! I'm sure it must have been late May or early June and a New York party sometime in the early 1980s. I know it was at New York because the girls hauled Anthony Haden-Guest to the copying machine to get repros of his dick, which was and hopefully still is of fabled dimensions. (That'll be $100 in cash from you, Anthony.) Pheromones were particularly thick that night and it wasn't long before R and I were establishing a degree of intimacy consonant with the season. She had long nails, and even amid the summer madness I remember thinking as I could feel them cutting painful furrows that this might turn out to be a problem.

Next day I reviewed the situation with my pal, the late Ian Hamilton, biographer of Lowell and of Salinger. Ian was roosting in my apartment on Central Park W. R had left a vivid quartet of nail marks, likely to be viewed with displeasure by E, with whom I was scheduled to spend a weekend in the country. There was of course the option of trying to shield my compromised shoulders from E, but this seemed to demand a degree of modesty more appropriate to the Middle Ages.

Eventually Ian and I hit on a variant of the old Poe "Purloined Letter" trick. Make it obvious. I had a prickly tree as a houseplant and backed into it forcefully, explaining later to E that I'd tripped into this vicious vegetation. She seemed to believe it?though she probably wasn't too keen for debates on lack of constancy because she was covered with bruises, which I reckoned had not come from contact with our old friend, the corner of the dining room table, but from horseplay with D.H., the noted rough-houser from Hollywood...

Now the floodgates of memory are truly open. The mutter has become a drone. Why, I recall in Ireland oh so long ago, at a house party in late May, Ricki, then wife of John Huston, mother of Anjelica, having an eruptive experience in early June on top of a stone wall, with Mickey L. They fell off and... I can remember because it was 1952, and I had an autograph book in which I insisted guests should put uplifting messages.

I'm looking at it now. A sprinkling of signatures. Not Ricki, who was nice, nor Mickey, who wasn't, but Lucian Freud, who wrote, "How many miles to the fortunate Isles?/Scarce a one! Fortune smiles/and may she smile on YOU." He signed it "Frucian Leud," which brings me back to poor Ian Hamilton, who broke so many hearts, not by summer madness but by being a poet with intent eyes that sucked women to their doom just like Freud's. So let's leave the rest of the story to the poets, to Swinburne:

"For winter's rains and ruins are over,/And all the season of snows and sins;/The days dividing lover and lover,/The light that loses, the night that wins;/And time remembered is grief forgotten,/And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,/And in green underwood and cover/Blossom by blossom the spring begins."

And to e.e. cummings:

"in Just-/spring when the world is mud-/luscious the little/lame balloonman/whistles far and wee"