I dreamed about my friend Lori last night. I still think of us as friends even though it’s far too many years since I last heard from her.
Dreams are strange things…we all know that…and I’m always intrigued when people I haven’t actively thought about in a while show up in my dreams and make such a powerful impression that they linger with me into the waking hours.
I wonder how the world is treating her…she was a girl of radiant, fragile beauty and quiet, wounding melancholy and for a brief season I wanted nothing more than to give her safe harbor from the unforgiving seas of disappointment and pain that buffeted her far too often.
I hope that she’s safe.
I hope that she’s happy.
I hope that she’s in the company of somebody who sincerely loves and appreciates her.
And I hope that she thinks about me every once in a while and that the memory makes her smile the shy, secret smile she used to share with me when she let her guard down and relaxed into my safe harbor.
(Me and Lori in the administrative offices of Max Factor & Co. in Hollywood, CA circa 1979)The moon, if it was out at all, was obscured by clouds…but he had already rewritten the memory to include a full measure of warm, golden moonlight…it just felt more right that way.
The ocean sang its eternal song, an amazing soundtrack to a sweetly amazing evening, and he was sitting in the cool sand, his heart racing, his senses captivated, his arms around the girl snuggled comfortably against his chest. Yeah, there just had to be moonlight.
The moon, her radiant smile beaming approvingly, witnessed the moment and he, for too brief a moment, forgot that there was anyone else in the world other than the girl…he willfully forgot that they would not…could not…ever be together for more than the fleeting moments they defiantly took for themselves.
The ocean shared its song…Luna shared her tender moonlight…and the moment lingered just long enough for him to know it was real.
Mary wanted to be a superwoman. Well, we were just children when we knew each other so I guess she wanted to be a supergirl. My friend Mary was a beautiful tomboy…with long dark hair and dark sparkling eyes (their light as often guarded and pensive as it was bright and smiling) and smooth tan skin that paid proud testimony to her Mexican heritage…just one of the guys who didn’t seem to realize that she was well into the process of blossoming into a breathtaking woman.
I, of course, had an unspoken crush on her. Nothing, I convinced myself, would come of it…I was a year younger than her, not to mention shy and chubby, and she…she was a coltish goddess…but I luxuriated in the intoxication of “loving” her with the silent passion of the young would-be poet that I was.
My family…my mother, my brother, and I…and Mary’s family…her mother, her stepfather (though, to be honest, I’m not sure they were actually married), her older sisters, and her little brother…lived in a duplex in South-Central Los Angeles (back then a great neighborhood, we were within walking distance of USC, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, some amazing museums, and a big library.) My family was upstairs, hers was downstairs.
Mary often hung out with us guys…joining us on our “adventures” and actively sharing in our boyish dares. I still vividly remember that day that she took the dare to leap off the roof of the duplex down to the lawn; the roof slanted down and the distance wasn’t that far but it still seemed like a bad idea to me. I shared my misgivings with Mary but she just gave me a jaunty wink and told me not to fret so much.
I remember Mary up on the edge of the roof, hesitating while looking down while the other guys egged her on. And then she jumped and for a painfully long moment time stopped as I watched her plummet to the lawn with gangly grace. Mary hit the ground with a dull thump and then she was still. The guys went still and quiet. I raced to her side as her sister came out of the house to see what was going on. She wasn’t really hurt… she just had the wind knocked out of her. I helped Mary to her feet while her sister screamed at her for doing something so stupid and screamed at us for encouraging her to do it.
Mary, for her part, winked at me and whispered…”told you I could do it”. I just nodded, loving her all the more while, at the same time, wanting to protect her from her impulse to take dares in an effort to be one of the “guys”. Mary’s sister sent her into the house and sent us guys away.
Mary’s family moved out of the duplex and my family moved across town into our own house (a house my mother still lives in all these years later.) Eventually the two families lost touch.
I know, without a doubt, that Mary turned into a beautiful woman. I hope, with all my heart, that Mary found someone who appreciated her…that she had the beautiful babies that, in her rare reflective moments, she admitted to wanting to have and raise and love with all of her expansive heart.
I’m not sure why Mary has come to mind of late…it’s been a long while since I thought of her so vividly…but I hope that she is indeed happy and well and fulfilled wherever life has taken her.
Emergency rooms in real life are nothing like they are on television shows. On TV, things are fast paced and injured people are whisked into rooms where harried but dedicated doctors work their magic while shouting out stuff like “stat!”
In real life, emergency rooms are a whole lot of sitting around and waiting. Granted, big city ERs…like the one I found myself in this past Sunday…have lots of people to deal with and they have to prioritize…frankly I just wish that my infected finger had been a high enough priority so that I didn’t have to sit in the waiting room for four hours (A&E was showing a Godfather marathon so I got to watch the end of Part 2 and a large chunk of Part 3) and sit in the examination room for another three hours waiting for a doctor to come take a look at my throbbing, swelling digit and decide that I needed to be admitted.
That said, the waiting room stay was warmed by a precious moment of grace: a little Latina (she couldn’t have been more than 2, there with her family waiting for someone to come out…none of them spoke English) came over and took my finger (it had been bandaged at my first stop at an “urgent care” clinic) and patted it gently and looked up at me with big brown eyes full of precocious wisdom and compassion as if to say “everything will be okay.” Just then the billing department called me in to check my insurance card and when I came out the family was gone.
The finger required surgery and two rest-broken nights in the hospital (the heavily bandaged finger…the middle finger of my left hand…is making it something of an adventure to type…you never realize how much you use something like that until you can’t.
I’m home with powerful antibiotics and enormous gratitude that I can sleep in my own bed…where well-meaning people won’t be waking me up every two hours to check vitals, change IVs, or administer shots…it’s all good.
At the risk of sounding like an old man gassing on with pompous proclamations that begin with “in my day…”, I remember the Halloweens of my childhood as kinder, gentler, more magical times than Halloweens seem nowadays.
Trick-or-Treating was a (mostly) carefree endeavor where children went from door to door in a neighborhood that was safe and full of people you knew (and, perhaps more importantly, full of people who knew your parents :-) We compared costumes…some store bought, some homemade…and collected treats delightful (those little bitty chocolate candy bars) and mildly disappointing (those rock-hard ribbon candies that linger in our bags until we could pawn them off to younger siblings or until everything else was gone.) And we could happily take fruit and homemade delights without fear of them containing poison or razor blades or anything else like that (the idea of taking our Halloween treasure to a hospital to have them x-rayed for dangerous things wasn’t part of our childhood experience.) The worst thing that could happen, we assumed, was a childish prank.
When I was in the 5th grade I made the Halloween rounds with Lloyd, my best friend at the time. We were both shy boys but we were quite at ease with each other. Lloyd lived across the street from the north side of
On the Halloween evening of that year, Lloyd and I made the rounds of the neighborhood together (my brother Guy was off with his bratty little friends which was just fine with me.) I was dressed in my plastic Batman helmet, my vinyl Batman cape, my cool Batman t-shirt, black pants, and my stylish Batman sneakers; Lloyd was decked out as a cowboy.
We went to my block of 40th Place first making a beeline for the vaguely spooky house of the old lady who lived across the street from me. She was one of the few white people left in what had at one time been an all-white middle class neighborhood and she mostly kept to herself; but every Halloween she made the most amazing little cakes, meticulously decorated, and handed them out. I knew to go to her house early because there were only so many that she made each year and when the last one was handed out she would shut off her porch light and apparently go to bed. Lloyd and I got there in time and took the precious little cakes over to my house to stash them in the refrigerator for safekeeping.
We circled the blocks we were allowed to visit collecting candy and gum and fruit until our bags were loaded down with sugary, chocolaty goodness. Having collected as much as we could…if not, being 5th grade boys who didn’t always know what was good for them, as much we wanted to…we stopped back by my house. I took off my helmet and my cape and stashed my loot on my bed while Lloyd retrieved his little cake.
As the hour was growing late I offered to walk Lloyd halfway home and he agreed. We sat off…the cowboy and the unmasked Batman…but as we reached the corner two teenage boys came running out of the darkness howling like banshees. Before we knew what was going on they had snatched Lloyd’s bag right out of his hands were running back into the darkness laughing.
Lloyd was devastated. I offered to share half of my candy with him but he adamantly refused so I took him back to my house and got another bag and we went out again. Trick-or-Treat time was winding down so many houses…including the house of the old white lady across the street…had already switched off their porch lights but we went to every house that still lit. I was, as I said, quite shy but I screwed up my courage to explain to people at the doors what had happened. Lloyd was tight-lipped, afraid that he might cry if he said anything he told me later, but the people were happy to give him more treats even though we’d been to their houses before (a couple gave him the remainder of what they had left in their bowls.
By the time we were done, Lloyd’s bag was almost as full as the first one had been. We went back to my house so that I could get my cousin Philip, who was in High School, to walk us to Lloyd’s house. Though part of me really didn’t want to, I tried to give Lloyd my little cake…sitting in its little box in the refrigerator…but, again, he refused. But when he wasn’t looking I slipped it into his bag anyway.
Philip walked us all the way to Lloyd’s house and then walked with me back home.
The next morning, I met Lloyd across the street from the north end of
It was, all things considered, a good Halloween.
I was not a very good student in High School. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this, it is simply a fact. I made good grades (I graduated “with honors”) but I really didn’t push myself as hard as I could have. Mostly, however arrogant it might sound, I was bored. Mostly, however foolish it might sound now, I was itching to be done with school and childhood and get to the promised land of adulthood. Being a grownup, I found, was okay but not nearly as magical as it seemed when I wasn’t one…but that’s the way of things when we are young and running too fast to not be young.
My High School (dear old Alexander Hamilton High in a western corner of Los Angeles) was culturally diverse…blacks and whites in abundance with a good number of children of Latin and Asian descent making the school a racial stewpot; a good percentage of the white kids were Jewish as we were reminded anytime a Jewish holiday coincided with a school day (lots of filmstrips and independent reading time on those days because so many of our classmates were away and teachers didn’t want to go over the same material twice)…but full of the same schoolyard politics (cliques and gossip and the like) as any other school.
I found all of that political stuff tedious beyond words and I ignored it as much as I could. I sought out isolated corners of the sprawling campus to read and be to myself but I rarely had them to myself as a stalwart circle of friends…social outcasts, by choice or by happenstance, like myself…gathered and we created an inclusive clique all our own.
Our principal…a diminutive silver haired, eagle eyed woman named Mrs. Jimenez…ruled
I did the homework for one class while half-listening to teachers talking in another class so that I didn’t have to lug books on the half-hour walk from the school to my house any more than I had to.
I had a small circle of loyal friends (a state of being that continues to this day) and secret crushes that are part and parcel of the existence of a teenaged boy (I think Gina knew that I was smitten with her but I don’t think she ever took me seriously.)
And I had Mrs. Zimmerman. I was blessed to be taught by several motivated and motivating teachers in my school days…Mrs. Levy in the 3rd grade, Mr. Daniels in the 5th grade, Mr. McIntosh in the 6th grade, Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Allen in Junior High, and Mrs. Zimmerman. Mrs. Zimmerman was an English teacher and she kind of took me under her wing and taught much about the one thing that did really engage me back then…that being writing, of course.
I ended up taking 5 or 6 classes with Mrs. Zimmerman over the course of my 3 years at
I never told her that, of course…teenaged boys don’t have the words to tell teachers how much they appreciate making them reach for the fullest potential they can…but I hope that she knew it somehow just the same.
It was their afternoon and they embraced it greedily. In the genially rambling crevices of her house they shut the rest of the world…their children, grandchildren, parents, friends, and acquaintances…out and luxuriated in each other’s company.
They had never had an afternoon like it before. And they would never have an afternoon like it again. But that afternoon…that languid, sensuous, sensual afternoon…was one that would linger in their hearts long after their passions had cooled and their paths had diverged.
That afternoon…that sweet, silly, amazing, wondrous afternoon…was filled with music (rock and roll to save their amorous souls) echoing through the soft shadows of the charmingly gothic corners of her house and with whispered, romantic, affectionately smutty whispers as they kissed and danced the dance of love in her bed, their energies so intimately entwined that they slipped casually, easily into positions that would have made Sting green with envy and which belied the number of years that they had each spent on the mother planet.
The house was filled with the savory aromas of food…seafood and sauces and pastas and salad greens…prepared in graceful tandem wearing only undergarments and secret smiles…and the steamy musk of enormously indulgent and gratifying sex lingered in passionately and with no care or need for time limits.
It was their afternoon…unplanned and unstructured and all the more magical for that…and they basked in it even as the evening crept over the horizon, through the windows, and all through the expansive comfort of her grand old house.
That afternoon…their afternoon…they had never had one like it before…they would never have one like it again…but it was, in the perfect measure of time, as magical an afternoon as the lovers could have dared to have imagined.
Cowboy was the guy that good girls’ mothers warned them about…and he was proud of that fact. Cowboy was a sight to behold…tall and rugged with dark brown hair, a thick moustache, and deep silver-blue eyes that always seemed to be smiling. He was born in the
Cowboy wore his cowboy hat rakishly and drove a big old Ford pickup that you could hear coming from blocks away. He smoked nothing but cheap cigars, drank nothing but beer and whiskey, and there were people who knew him for years without ever knowing what his given name was (it was Brian but nobody but his mother and his grandmother called him that.) He was a self-styled good ol’ boy before that term had been used to death and, again, he was proud of that. Still and all, his charm was such that he attracted an eclectic group of friends, lovers, and acquaintances and few folks had a cross word to say about the man.
Cowboy couldn’t carry a tune to save his life but that didn’t stop him from happily braying out his favorite Hank Williams or Willie Nelson songs when the mood struck him.
Cowboy did have his faults, of course…he did, for example, sometimes drink a wee bit too much (but, being a happy drunk, even that failed to take away from his appeal) and, though usually affable and forgiving, he had no problem coming to blows if he felt someone was slighting him or somebody he cared about (I bailed him out of jail once after he got into a row with the brother of one his former paramours outside of a bar in Hollywood one humid summer night.)
And he was not by any stretch of the imagination a faithful lover…often he would be juggling two or three (or more) girlfriends at the same time and managing, for impressive stretches of time, to keep it going without it blowing up in his face. Some women found that less easy to live with than others but, strangely enough, most of them remembered the good times more than the bad times when it was over.
Cowboy and I were not best friends or anything…we were far too different for that…but, for a brief season, we got along just fine (I occasionally got to see the quiet, reflective Cowboy that he rarely showed to most people in his ever-widening circle of acquaintance.)
Last time I saw Cowboy he was off to
The pounding on the door was insistent, anxious; it would not be denied. Solid metallic thumps on the security door thundering through the ebony stillness of the wee hours…adrenaline surging through every fiber of my being. I lurched up, all of my senses screaming to be left in their restive state, wrenching myself from the dream world and back into the real world.
I glanced at the clock on the nightstand, the bright crimson glow of its numbers mocking me mercilessly…
My disorientation faded slowly as I sat up in bed. I listened for a moment…just in case it wasn’t a dream. The world was, of course, almost completely still…no pounding…and every housemate (two-legged and four-legged alike) still slumbering peacefully in their chosen sleeping places.
I shambled to the bathroom…darting apparitions, having followed me from the dreaming, played hide-and-seek behind me but I ignored them.
Yawning, I shambled back to the bedroom and tumbled back into bed…and then I lay there wide awake and praying to be accepted back into the dream world while every other housemate (two-legged and four-legged alike) continued to slumber peacefully in their chosen sleeping places.
The clock, taunting me with its impertinent crimson numbers (stupid clock), continued to mock me mercilessly: 3:48…
Rats.
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