Sunny: The Hippie Chick

By Dawn Natelle

This is the new story I am starting. I’m going to try to get a chapter a week out of this and Stone. (Revised as of March 26): Dawn

Chapter 1 – Sunny

Although I didn’t know her name at the time, I first met Sunny on a Monday early in November 1965. She was panhandling on Haight Street, at the bus stop where I got off from my short commute to UC Med Center, where I was in first year premed. There was a newsstand there where I bought my daily Chronicle and Examiner, and any other magazines I liked. She was about 40 feet away, so as to not bother the news agent, shaking her little tambourine and hoping passersby would drop a coin in the hat beside her.

She was extremely cute, and as an 18-year-old student I quickly rated her as a 10. She had extremely long blonde hair, and a smile that suited her name. She was quite well endowed up top, but thin everywhere else. I dropped a dollar in her hat as I passed, and when she noticed she thanked me. Her eyes told me ‘Now I can eat tonight’. There were only coins in the hat under my one, and not many of them.

The next three days were miserable with outright rain on Tuesday and Wednesday and an evil drizzle on the Thursday, and I didn’t see her as I went to school. But on Friday it was dry and overcast and as the bus home from school neared the stop, I could see her there. I dropped another one in her hat and was rewarded with that brilliant smile again. I decided to take a shot and talk to her.

“I missed you the last few days,” I said.

“Nobody ever gives when it is raining,” she said. “I could spend eight hours out here and not catch anything but a cold. I work in the 24-hour laundromat down the street when it rains, folding clothes for tips. I made enough to think about going to the concert at the Avalon tonight. Your dollar means I will be able to take the bus instead of walking.”

“Who’s playing?”

“Jefferson Airplane, some new guy named Santana, and Big Brother, who have a new singer, Janice Joplin.”

“That sounds like an interesting line-up. Are you going with anyone?”

“No, I’m solo. I just moved down here from North Beach, which has gotten dead lately, so I don’t know anyone down here yet.”

“You know me. I’m Mitch,” I stuck my hand out. “I don’t suppose a pretty girl like you would want to go with me?”

“Sure, if you’ve got the $2.50 for admission plus bus fare. I’m going to work here till six, so if you drop by, we can catch the 6.05 bus. It’ll get us there early, but I don’t like working after 6. There are some goons that come by then and hassle me. I’m Sunny, short for Sunshine.”

“I’ll be here, Sunny”

“See you, Mitch.”

I headed on to my apartment, nearly skipping in delight at snagging a date with such a hot girl. I rent a one-bedroom a half block away that I share with another student. Ben pays $10 a month and sleeps on the rollout bed/couch, while I pay $15 and get the bedroom. There is one bathroom and a tiny kitchen, but usually we eat out or order in. Students seldom cook.

I was back at the bus stop at 5:55, and Sunny gathered up her money, sliding it into a large bag she toted around. She then plopped the hat on her head and hooked her tambourine to a string around her neck, so it hung just below her breasts.

We got to the Avalon at 6:20, and since the hall wouldn’t open till 8, I offered to buy her dinner. There was a little Italian place nearby, so we went in and I ordered a pizza, a new food Sunny had never experienced before. She clearly liked it and ate four of the eight slices before I finished my second.

“Take another,” I prompted, noticing her eying the remaining pieces hungrily. “I never eat four.”

“Thanks,” she said quickly grabbing the larger of the two remaining slices. “I haven’t eaten much this week, trying to save money for the concert.”

She ate the last slice more slowly, and I was able to get some background out of her. Apparently, she had been raised in Tulsa, but moved out here five years ago after grade 10 and had been living on the streets ever since. That made me pause. Unless she left high school at 13, she was older than me. I fessed up immediately that I was only 18 and she laughed. “I’m 20, but don’t worry. A couple years difference doesn’t matter when you are our ages.

I told her I was at UC Medical Center and that impressed her. I was also from a small town, but in-state. Eureka, California is about as far north as you can get and still be in the state. I was on a scholarship, but also had a trust fund from an uncle, so money was not a problem for me. We chatted about a lot of things and found we both had a love of the new music. I was jealous that she had seen the Beatles play the Cow Palace in August, when I was still in Eureka. Sunny said she also like reading but said she couldn’t do much of it living on the streets. You really can’t tote books around when you are on the move. She did clue me in on a bookstore in the north end called City Lights Books and her description made me eager to check it out.

After I settled the bill leaving a nice tip on the $5 cost of the pie and our drinks, we headed out and got to the Avalon. There were a few people in line, and we filed in behind them when the doors opened.

The concert was great, and we staggered out after 11, in time to catch the night bus home. Sunny mentioned at the Beatles show had only been a half hour, 12 songs, and she really couldn’t hear the music due to all the screaming fans. It also cost $5.50 for a cheap ticket, and really was a waste of money.

On the nearly empty bus Sunny leaned into my shoulder and I felt I might have a chance.

“Where will you stay tonight?” I asked.

“Probably in the laundromat. It is fairly safe in there. I’ve gotten used to sleeping with the lights on.”

“You could sleep in my apartment,” I said. “I have a big double bed. And the lights go out.”

Sunny paused, and then took a deep breath. ‘Please say yes,’ I said to myself. But what she said completely floored me.

“Would it bother you to sleep in the same bed as a girl with a penis? I have to ask, because sometimes guys get violent when they find out how I am different.”

It took me nearly three blocks on the bus to answer: “Well, I am not a violent person. But I can’t see you as anything other than a girl. A pretty girl.”

She looked around at the nearly empty bus. The only other passengers were several rows in front of us, looking to the front of the vehicle. “Reach under my dress, and my bra,” she offered.

I did, and to my surprise I didn’t feel my first female breast. Instead it was terrycloth. I pulled out a folded-up hand towel.

“Careful. Don’t open it,” she warned. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to fold those into that shape.” She took the towel back and returned it to her bra, then used her hands to shape it to her satisfaction.

We got off the bus soon after, and I led her to my apartment in an old Georgian house that had been broken into apartments. We crept in quietly in the dark, past my snoring negro roommate, already in bed. Inside the bedroom I could turn on the light and leaned in to kiss the pretty blonde standing next to me. I have never kissed a boy before, and soon realized that I still hadn’t. She kissed like a girl, and there was a stirring below my belt. But Sunny stopped it, saying she needed to go to bed since Saturday was a busy day for her. I reluctantly let go, and undressed. Sunny didn’t, and just crawled into the bed with her sundress on, only taking off her hat, sandals, and tambourine.

The next morning, I woke up when I felt her get out of bed. Did I have my hand over her waist while I was asleep? As she padded towards the door, I told her the washroom was the door to the left and immediately wondered if she would meet Ben. Then I looked at the alarm clock and saw it read 9:18. Ben would already be at his job at the grocery, where he was a packer at $1.25 cents an hour. Sunny and I would have the place to ourselves until after 6. Then I remembered her saying she was going to work the streets today. I made up my mind to delay that as long as possible.

Sunny came back to the room excited. “You have a shower. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a shower? Up in North Beach I used the Y, but there is nothing down here. I’ve had to take towel baths in the laundromat late at night.

“Just wait a second while I use the facilities. You can shower or bathe after that.”

I dashed off to do my business, and then headed back into the room. When I came in, I saw Sunny standing there, wearing only her panties, which had a very small bump in the front. I will admit to staring. Her bra and her towel-boobs were lying on the bed, along with her sundress. Her long blonde hair hung down to her bum, but what caught my eyes was her chest. Two boy nipples on a completely flat, hairless chest that was thinner than it had looked when she had the bra on. It was like a girl head on a boy body. She turned around and dropped the panties too, but I didn’t get a chance to see anything as she darted off to the bathroom. Her hips were thin and boyish, I noticed as she dashed away.

I heard water running in the bathroom. It sounded more like a bath than the shower. If she hadn’t had a proper bath in weeks (months?) she deserved the full treatment. I picked up her things and got a whiff: they were rank. I gathered them up and headed down to the basement laundry room and put them in the coin-operated washing machine along with a few of my things.

I was back up in the bedroom when a refreshed looking Sunny came out of the bathroom, holding a towel around her head and another wrapped around her body: girl style. And she really looked like a girl again with a towel over her nipples, although a flat-chested one.

“Where are my clothes?” she asked.

“In the washing machine,” I said. “The wash cycle will run another 22 minutes, and then I’ll head down for the dryer which will probably be 20 minutes.”

“Don’t put my bra or panties in the dryer,” she warned. “I usually hand wash them, but as long as they don’t get into the dryer, they should be okay.” She reached into her bag, and pulled out another pair of panties, which she shimmied into under the towel. However, the towel on her head fell off, revealing her long and very wet, but now clean, hair. “I apologize. I think I used up a lot of your shampoo. But my hair really needed cleaning.”

“No problem,” I said. “Why don’t you get under the covers. I think I have a brush somewhere. I’ll brush your hair till it dries.”

So, for the next 90 minutes, minus a few breaks to head down to the basement, I brushed that long beautiful hair, as we chatted. I learned about Sunny’s past in Tulsa. She had always known she was a girl, but her father kept trying to make her into a mini-me. He bought her a bike at age eight and taught her to ride, even though she hated it. It all blew up on him when she was being chased by some of boys who bullied her, and she hit a curb and sprawled on a wrought iron boundary fence. It was only a foot high, but she landed on her crotch. The bullies fled, of course, but the lady who owned the house called an ambulance when she discovered Sunny bleeding from the groin.

She lost a testicle in the first operation, and about a year later she lost the other. The doctors explained that she would have to take a testosterone drug when she was a few years older to order to boot start her puberty. This terrified her, and when the time came she palmed the pills instead of taking them. After a month she was tested again, and the doctor found her blood off, so doubled the testosterone dosage and prescribed for a 90-day supply with pills twice a day instead of once.

When her mother found the hidden cache of the first pills there was a loud and long screaming match between her parents and her, winding up with the decision that she would take the pills with her mother watching. She took two that evening, and they were the last ones she would use. At about four that morning, she left the house and walked to the bus station, getting a 7 a.m. bus to Oklahoma City. From there she decided her meager cash would not get her to the west coast, so she hitched out of the city. She was not feminine at the time, with the short haircut her father insisted on, and male jeans and a t-shirt, looking like a teenage runaway, which of course she was.

There were several shorter rides, but she got one in a truck headed to Denver, and later one from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, her goal. She knew a boy from town was there somewhere and wandered the city for two weeks until she saw him coming out of a seedy looking boxing gym.

She spent the next four years living with him, paying her way by giving him her testosterone pills. He wanted to bulk up, and did so, gaining nearly 100 pounds of muscle over the following three years. Then the pills ran out, and he ran off to join a travelling wrestling group, leaving Sunny to fend for herself. She was no longer a boy. She had grown her hair and it was now 30 inches long. Part way along the way, she started wearing dresses and with her unchanged voice, hairless chin and naturally pretty face, she passed easily as a skinny girl.

For a year she couch-surfed with friends she had made with the latter-day beatniks and gradually started to panhandle with a tambourine she bought for a dollar at a swap meet. She didn’t make much until she bought a bra and learned her trick with the towels. Being busty resulted in a five-fold increase in her takings, although still only a few dollars a day.

Finally, with the beatnik scene dying in North Beach, she had moved to the Haight a few months earlier, discovering the laundromat and getting her panhandling spot on the street.

I didn’t have nearly as interesting story. I lived in Eureka my entire life and was a bit of a nerd, or as it was called in those days, a square. I did well in school, getting all A’s, but not so well in real life, only getting two dates all through high school, and that was only because I was tall, and the girl was into tall guys. Just not tall guys like me.

But the result was that I aced my SATs and was able to pretty much pick and choose my university. I wanted somewhere warmer than Eureka, which is the same latitude as Canada. (I know there are two states to the north of us, by I learned in High School geography class that the northern California border was the same latitude as eastern Canada.) And Eureka was only 100 miles south of that border. I wanted to become a doctor, so UC Med was my preferred site, although in the rainy cool San Francisco winter I sometimes wished I had chosen LA or San Diego. San Fran in the winter was nearly as wet as Eureka. My trust fund paid tuition, books and a food plan on campus, as well as rent off campus. There was also $50 a week for spending money, and so far, I had never used more than $30, saving the rest.

After I went down and brought up the laundry from the wash, Sunny got out of bed and put on the t-shirt I had worn to the concert (and had thrown in with her stuff). She hung her damp bra and panties on the shower rail in the bathroom, and then came back to bed, still looking incredibly cute to me in spite of no breasts. My shirt was huge on her and hung down halfway to her knees.

“This is comfy,” she said with a grin. “It is mine now.” That was followed up by one of those Sunny smiles that left me willing to give her the shirt off my back, let alone that rather worn one that my parents had gotten me at some vacation they took.

She crawled back into bed and had me continue brushing her hair, which was now half done, and looked fabulous. Over the next half-hour I finished it, and then Sunny started folding up the towels in her particular pattern. When she was happy with them, she bounced off the bed and zipped into the bathroom, coming out wearing the still damp bra under my shirt.

“You look … uhm, bigger,” I noted.

“You noticed? It’s the towels. They are clean and fluffy, so they look a bit bigger. I like having big boobs. It makes me look more like a real girl.”

“It’s almost noon,” I noted. “Want to go out for lunch?”

“More pizza?” she said hopefully.

“No, but there is a nice deli a half block down Haight.”

“Oh, I have seen that, but never ate there. It is a bit out of my price range.”

“Well, I am treating, so it doesn’t matter. But you are going to have to put something on your legs. They look cute and all that, but the decency cops might object.”

“Yeah. I wish I had some shorts. I won’t wear jeans: they look too boyish.” She pulled the shirt off and put on her newly cleaned sundress.

We went to the deli and each had a huge sandwich and a pickle. When Sunny was done, licking the crumbs off the plate, she noted that she should get her tambourine and head out to her spot near the corner.

“How much money will you make?” I asked.

“Probably less than $5 at this time of the day,” she replied.

I laid a $10-bill in front of her. “Take this and you won’t have to work today,” I said. “Spend it with me. I like having you around.”

She picked the bill up slowly, as if she had never had one before. “Just for hanging out? Nothing else?”

“Well, I’m hoping you will spend the night again, but nothing kinky expected. Just like last night.”

“Last night was heavenly. Sleeping in a real bed. Okay, you’ve hired your own personal hippie chick for the day. What are we doing?”

“Come with me,” I said, and we left the deli for a thrift store a few stores down. “You need shorts, maybe another dress or two so you aren’t forced to sit in a towel in my bed while laundry happens. Don’t worry about the cost: I’m paying.”

Sunny was in heaven. She picked out five dresses that looked like they might fit and went to the little dressing room to try them on. Three of them were adorable, and I ordered her to take them all, along with both pair of shorts she tried on. The dresses were only $2 each, and the shorts two for $2. While she was in the changing room for the latter, a clerk asked me if she could help.

“Do you have any bras in 32D,” I asked. I had peeked at the sizing when I washed her old bra.

“Oh, that’s an odd size, the woman said. Let me look,” she went away and came back just as Sunny was coming out of the dressing room, reporting that both pairs of short fit fine. Since she was wearing a dress, she hadn’t been able to show them off to me.

“Sorry sir, we only have this one,” the salesclerk said, holding up the bra with its big cups. “It is only $1 though.”

“We’ll get it,” I said. “along with all this other stuff.” I turned to Sunny. “Do you want some more panties?”

“The ones in that bin are on sale four for $2,” the clerk offered helpfully.

“Get eight then,” I ordered and a giggling Sunny went off to pick while I took the rest of the goods to the till, and paid for them, along with the panties Sunny dumped on top of the pile after making her choices.

“Thank you, Mitch,” she said. “But you know this means I will have to keep them at your apartment. I can’t be toting such a big bag of clothes around on the street. It kinda ruins the homeless-waif look I am shooting for.”

“You aren’t homeless anymore,” I told her as she clung to my arm. “You can stay at the apartment as long as you want, at least for the next four years until I graduate. Longer probably since I will hopefully get into medical school after pre-med.”

“Can we go in there?” Sunny said as we passed a little Italian market. “I want to spend some of my money.”

“I will pay,” I said, but she insisted that we use her money. She bought a lot of groceries: basics like bread, eggs, and milk and other things like spices, fruits and vegetables, and pasta. “I am making a real dinner for you boys tonight,” she announced. She spent a lot of her ten, and I wound up carrying two big paper sacks of groceries, with Sunny taking over her thrift shop loot.

In the apartment Sunny put the groceries away while I cleaned up some of the mess in the apartment: mainly pizza boxes and other take-out food containers. That only took a half hour, and when I was done, I took the folding chair we called furniture and sat and watched her cook. She was lovely, darting to and fro, with her thin body moving like a ballet dancer.

Just after six, she had been at it for over two hours and the smells coming from the kitchen were tantalizing. Then Ben came in and stopped in his tracks. “What smells so good?” he asked.

“Ben, this is Sunny. Sunny, meet Ben,” I introduced. “Sunny is making us supper.”

“Wow, Mitch. I didn’t know you were so good with the ladies. Sunny is beautiful.”

“Thanks Ben. I hope you like spaghetti and meatballs,” she said.

“Anything with meat. I’m famished. Eight hours of pushing shopping carts around for ten bucks. No tips at all today,” the big black man said.

“It will be ready in ten minutes. Can one of you big guys set the table?”

“Uhh … we’d have to build a table first,” I confessed. “And this is the only chair.”

“Do you at least have plates and silverware?” Sunny sounded a bit disgusted.

“Oh yeah, my mom sent down a four-place setting,” I noted. “And there are some serving platters in the lower right cabinet.”

“Okay. Well, would one of you big guys set the floor then?” she asked.

We ate sitting in a circle on the floor, and it was the most amazing meal we ever had. And we had ordered spaghetti in several times in the past.

Ben leaned back and patted his taut, muscular stomach. “That was excellent. I’d offer to marry you, Sunny, even though I would probably get lynched with a cute white girl like you. San Fran is pretty liberal, but I don’t know if it extends to cross-race couples.”

I cleaned up and did the dishes, and listened as Sunny told Ben about her life, leaving nothing out.

“So, you are a tranny, then” Ben asked.

“And you are a nigger,” she replied. Ben reacted as though she slapped his face.

“I am transsexual,” Sunny explained. “Calling me that other term is just as bad as me calling you a nigger.”

“I apologize,” Ben said. “I think from now on I’ll just call you Sunny. Besides, I’ll probably get called that a dozen times at the shipyards tomorrow.”

“And remember, this is not something to be spread around,” I told him. “I’m surprised she even told you.”

“Well, if we are going to be roommates. Although I will be staying with Mitch,” Sunny said. My heart leapt. She is going to stay.

“You lucky bastard, Mitch,” Ben blurted out and then stopped abruptly as he realized that Sunny was not a normal girl, and what he was envisioning would necessarily be different.