Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 9 - 10

Chapter 9.  

Travels With Kai.

Kai and I set off for my second travels with girls in May, 1998. She paid for her ticket by modeling for me, and I paid the traveling expenses in exchange for her modeling in whatever nudist locations we could find.

Our itinerary was to fly to San Francisco, tour around the west, then on to my cottage in Connecticut, and from there to France, and then to come back the same way.

The first place we went was Haight-Ashbury, and found the hippie lifestyle was still very active there, at least in the shops. We found many crazy costumes and Kai tried them on in the changing rooms while I watched.

We bought a couple of the best of them, including a tiger dress and some wild boots. Kai did a fashion show for my video in our hotel room.

Traveling with Kai was a novel experience, very different from Rochelle, who was happy with whatever we did. Kai was strong-minded and very fixed in her pleasures and what she wanted.

This was brought home to me in Santa Cruz, the first place we drove in our rental car from San Francisco.

But while I'm thinking about it, wouldn't California be a different place if it didn't have all those saints' names and Spanish names? I don't mind San Francisco so much, since St Francis was in many ways the first hippie, but wouldn't Monterey be different if we called it "King's Mountain?"

Santa Cruz means "Holy Cross" and Las Vegas means "the grassy plains," which sounds fairly creepy, considering the sort of terrain around it. And wouldn't Los Angeles be a different place if we called it "The Angels?"

In Santa Cruz we found a lovely open air dining area right on the beach, so we sat down for a cup of tea, which to Kai was a morning's necessity.

Unfortunately in this restaurant, as with many in America, tea was a boutique drink. They presented us with a box containing fifty exotic teas, none of which was just plain tea.

We considered these for awhile, and then asked the waiter,

"Ah, well, it happens we've just been to the supermarket, so would it be OK if we got a tea bag out of the car and used it?

He was very nice about it, but then came the problem of milk. They only had half and half in those little long-life containers, which Kai pointed out were loaded with preservatives and other chemicals, and anyway she didn't like cream in her tea.

"Ah, well, at the supermarket we actually also bought a pint of milk, would it be OK if we went and got that out of the car too?"

In the end they were very nice about it, they gave us the hot water and the use of the cup for free. I ordered a sandwich in gratitude, enjoying the fine day and the view and the company, but wondering what I had gotten myself into.

I'd already had a taste of Kai's preferences the nights when we were in San Francisco. Kai loves music, so we went to several jazz bars, so Kai could maybe pick up a jazz musician.

It was fun getting a Kai's-eye view of men. She was very perceptive about what the men were like. Generally she could pick out her type very well, though I remember once she made a mistake.

She picked out a guy who was the leader of a jazz group, and tried to chat him up during the break, but got a rather cold-hearted rebuff. The guy was just too conceited and full of himself.

As it happened, the club only had people at three of its tables, and the people at one of the tables got up after awhile and left, and then the other. So we got up and left too, leaving the leader and his group playing to an empty restaurant. Quelle revenge!

Kai had better luck with Jim, who was just the type of guy she loved, tall and thin and haggard looking. Kai went off for a day with him, while I toured San Francisco.

Jim was nearly forty, and he had recently been offered a standard job. He was thinking of giving up on his jazz career, which had been going nowhere for awhile. Kai told him he should be true to his art and keep going. They kept emailing back and forth during our trip.

Romance was important to Kai. Not me, I'd had several experiences since Kate, but mostly they made me more cynical. It was fun to watch Kai struggling. Perhaps that was mean of me, but I felt I was a lot better off with travels with girls.

What about sex, you may be asking? Well, I did have sex with some of the girls I traveled with. It didn't seem a goal worth struggling for, however.

There's a lot of negative energy about sex, and it seems to make some women crazy. I think that's because society is so critical of girls who copulate randomly. So girls generally start demanding some form of "commitment" if you have sex with them.

Actually, I think girls want to be promiscuous. They can have one orgasm after another, which seems to show they are designed for a multiple succession of lovers.

Girls love to perform. Far more girls want to be actors than men, or dancers, and many are happy to perform for groups of men as strippers. Or nude models, for that matter.

I was content with that. I loved traveling too, and by taking a nude model and making videos, the trip would pay for itself -- and indeed make a handsome profit. I preferred enthusiastic video to a chaos of sex and romance.

Sex is temporary. Video lasts longer.

Kai and I went to Yosemite, a national park so wonderful I won't even try to describe it. One of the earliest mountain men, who traveled all over the West before almost any white men had ever been there, said that the greatest day of his life was the first day he visited Yosemite Valley. He had that inscribed on his tombstone.

Kai went on a few hikes with me, but her heart wasn't really in it. She hadn't had any grass since Jim. She soon fixed that.

We went north to Chico, because it was supposed to be another centre for alternative lifestyle people. We went out trawling for guys once again in a nightclub with a pool hall. One great thing about travels with Kai was, you got to meet people.

She met a guy named Mischa. I don't think she really fancied him, but he had grass to sell. We went back to his place, which kind of resembled Marc's, but the guy didn't have any ecstacy. So no naked party.

Mischa took us to his favourite pizza place, which brought out Kai's curious whims again. She had taken up raw foods, maybe a fall-out from her spree with Jim. She wanted raw vegetables and nuts.

"Sorry, we don't have those."

"But you put nuts on the pizzas, don't you? And carrots? So bring me a pizza with nuts and carrots, without the pizza."

She got her way. She had many quirks and quiddities, like smoking. She smoked tobacco as well as marijuana frequently, but it had to be organic tobacco. No chemicals for her! It made traveling with Kai interesting as well as fun.

Chapter 10.

The Wilderness.

We went on to Connecticut, to my cottage. It was built by my grandfather in 1934, and I used to go there with my mother and sisters as a boy. Being surrounded by state forests, it hasn't changed much over the years. So usually my visits there are like going back into a past of happy memories. Not this time though. This time it was new happy memories.

Kai loved to perform, so we had parties where she would dress up naked, as she had at Floyd's, and I would make video of her, using whatever lighting tricks and props we could employ. We got some LSD, I forget where, and the parties were fun.

Soon we went to Starwood, the huge festival and gathering where my videos got started with Beauty of the Nude. Kai loved it. She got body painted by an expert on the site, and danced to the drumming of an expert named Thunder, a big fat guy with dredlocks and a huge attitude.

Kai had one of the best weeks of her life at Starwood. She met Raven, a wandering girlcatcher who prowled Starwood every year. Raven was hardly her type, but he had a lot of charm, and Kai made him part of her happy week.

Raven, in fact, gave us one of the best parties I've ever been to. He turned 40 shortly after Starwood, and rented a hot tub for a toga party. He hoped to reignite the wildness of Starwood in his home in suburbia.

Kai arrived and found the water bed in Raven's bedroom. She too wanted to make the party go, so she took off all her clothes and rolled around on the water bed.

Raven had an interesting crowd: a lot of friends around 40 like him, and another lot of 20-somethings that worked for him. He was director of the sales department in his area for a major mobile phone company. Mobile phones were new in those days, and he was selling lots and making a fortune.

The young people were all very excited about their mobile phones, ringing all their friends to ask where was a great party? It didn't seem to occur to them to try to make the party around them go. Raven had forgotten how dry and stale young people had become, compared to his youth in the 60's. The party stalled badly.

In the 60's we struggled to end an unjust war in Viet Nam. We worked for equal rights for minorities and gays. We focused on conservation, with the first Earth Day in 1970. We tried to discover the spiritual aspects of drugs. We revolutionized sex, or thought we did.

Kids in the 90's had tattoos and piercings. Each generation does its own thing.

Kai came out periodically to put on her beloved techno music, but the young people changed it for something frantic as soon as her back was turned.

I had fun watching Kai, and watching Raven gamely trying to lure people into his rented hot tub. Once a young man who hadn't yet seen Kai came into the bedroom to see her naked on the water bed, and he walked out looking as if he had seen God or something. That was one of the highlights of the evening.

Kai and I went to Europe. We visited England, France, and Holland, and did videos in all these places. You can see the results in Naked Travels 1, 2, and 3.

Unfortunately, it got harder and harder to get Kai to participate. She got cold feet. I took her to the Luxemburg Gardens in Paris, where the year before Roshelle had an amorous French man coming hard on her. I'd planned doing a shoot of Kai going naked in public around the fountain, and Kai had agreed when we were in Byron Bay, but now she refused.

Could I blame her? Considering what happened to Roshelle, maybe not. But it's disappointing to bring a model halfway around the world and then get no video.

Kai finally caught the lover she wanted, a Dutch man named Dan who was tall and thin and just what she wanted. It turned out to be transitory, but I'm sure it was delightful while it lasted.

Video lasts longer than sex. Often it lasts longer than romance too.