Free Room Service by Frank Moorhouse

Mary heard the waitress telling us the story andcalled out – in the saddest voice I’ve heard – ‘even here in Marin there will be some explaining to do when my man gets home tomorrow. Oh boy.’
    Next day Tracy and I went over to the Berkeley campus where all the radicalism of the 1960s began and the inspiration of much that happened in radicalism in Australia. I explained to Tracy that we were part of it – even in Sydney – we knew all about the Free Speech movement and Mario Savio and the underground newspapers. She said that although she was too young to have been in it her stepfather had told her all about it.
    I told her that in Sydney we pronounced it – ‘Barkley’ (as in ‘Berkeley Square’ in England) because we’d read about the Berkeley campus, but none of us had been there.
    I didn’t tell her that I’d also been a beatnik, which also started in San Francisco – before she was born.
    The Berkeley campus seems more into parachuting and windsurfing these days.
    The Berkeley Barb newspaper no longer exists, but the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian , had a stale obligatory article by Noam Chomsky on plans he thought Israel had for controlling Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and South Africa. But the big story in The Daily Californian was on the ‘mellowing of rock and roll’. The page-one story was a round up of the rock scene and especially the all-woman group the Go-Gos. ‘Their music is fun (like Disneyland) and safe (like Suburbia).’
    Just off campus Tracy took me to the People’s Mural, which is painted along the building near the People’s Park – the scene of many historic radical gatherings. The mural shows the history of radicalism from the 1960s to the 1980s – the free speech movement – anti-Vietnam War, flower power, psychedelic drugs, environmentalists, commune movement, and finally the mural shows the People’s Park as it is now – occupied by burned-out kids, alcoholics and beggars.
    Tracy noticed some grafitti on the mural and exclaimed that until recently no one would have written graffitti on the People’s Mural – ‘That’s a really tacky thing to do,’ she said unhappily.
    Everyone outside Marin County is reading The G Spot and other recent discoveries about human sexuality , by Alice Kahn Ladas, Beverly Whipple and John D. Perry.
    In Marin, of course, they knew about the G spot years ago. It took a long time for some of us to learn about the other spot and now we have to worry about the G spot. The Grafenberg spot is a female pleasure source inside the vagina. Female ejaculation is in too.
    But seriously, Chief, there’s a lot in the G-spot thing – Tracy says it’s true. When you touch it the woman says, ‘Gee’.
    I’ll hang out a little longer at the No Names Bar awaiting the old telex saying, ‘Extend indefinitely Marin County assignment. Send series on G spot, deep-tissue massage, and the mellowing of rock and roll.’

Blase in Pacific Paradise
    The Editor, Dear sir, I am the Recreation Director of the Inter-Continental Hotel, Port Vila, Vanuatu. The well-being and harmony of the guests here at the Inter-Continental is my first concern. There is someone here called Francois Blase claiming to be a travel writer for your magazine and wanting 15 per cent off everything. He’s been asking for special rates from the nautch girls at the Club Privé. He did a performance, which he called ‘Somerset Maugham in Love’, at the hotel talent quest on Monday and despite the fact that no one seemed to understand the act, he won the vote by rigging things with the staff and some air hostesses and won the lamp made from coral.
    Here at the Inter-Continental we try to get people together for tennis and golf, and so on, and they can put their names on the guest notice board. This Blase has put up a sheet for polo and wants to get