This girl Gail Davis, who worked with me at Filene's basement and had gingivitis and stringy hair, and who lived with her parents in a high rise apartment building in someplace like Brighton, and I became good friends, mostly because we thought of ourselves as "the last two left."
By that, we meant we were the last two remaining virgins in Boston, if not on the face of the planet. Everyone we knew had done "it" by now, except for us. Well, in my less kind moments I could understand why Gail had not had the opportunity to do "it" yet. She lived with her parents for one thing. And of course there was the stringy hair and gum disease. But what was my excuse? I lived on swinging Beacon Hill with two girls who had done "it" several times. One even had a steady boyfriend we all had to leave the apartment for, when he came over so they could do "it' in the one bedroom two of us shared. The third has a converted closet all to herself and we all coveted that one.
I was nineteen years old and it was still 1967. Only months before, I had left school and immediately obtained birth control along with my job at the Harvard "Coop," and my first apartment in Cambridge with Wendy and Steve. I knew I would soon be doing "it" with the perfect hippie boyfriend who I would meet on a peace march or maybe in a writing class. I went to the marches and took the classes, but I did not meet the right boy.
I met boys who turned out to be friends, good friends, with whom I smoked dope in Harvard Square or in the Old Burying Grounds where famed poets and Revolutionaries watched over us. I met my "beautiful man" who bought textbooks for a class he was teaching at Harvard when I met him over the phone when he'd call in to order the books, and when I saw him approach with his army surplus jacket and shaggy hair, big as a bear, I knew it was him, even before I heard his soft poetic speech from the telephone.
But alas the Beautiful man was married with small children and there was that babysitting experience that ruined the fantasy for good.
My one true love of that summer was Zachary, of the I and Thou Coffee House. The I and Thou was next to the Haight Theater in San Francisco where I just had to go for the Summer of Love, hitching a ride from three boys, friends of friends, which I did not mention to my mother (I think I made them girls, in that version of the story), and Zachary could be found there most evenings. He was lean and handsome with a beard and winsome eyes. And I thought Zachary! Zachary will be the one. Alas, it was not so, and that is a story for another installment.
I moved into the apartment on Beacon Hill when I returned from my Summer of (not as much as I had hoped) Love because the roommates were moving on and the Coop job was lost to inattention and through this and that (a few more good stories and some not so good men) I ended up in a too crowded third floor walk up on the wrong side of the Hill and a Christmas job at Filene's basement.
On Beacon Hill I met Gilly, oh so cute Gilly, who I was far too naive to understand was not into doing "it" with any woman, no matter how cute. But Gilly and I bonded over a friendly competition for the best discards on trash day from the folks on the "good" side of the Hill; Louisberg Square was a haven for cast off furniture, and all you had to do was haul it up and over the Hill and up the three flights of stairs and voila, instant shabby chic. Gilly's apartment was gorgeous and so was he, another male friend. I was racking them up.
It was now past Christmas. I went home to Methuen, my mom, my sister and the new dog Gretchen, a present for my sister's birthday from my wayward father. And back to the Hill before New Year's, where I had the apartment to myself. I planned a cozy New Year's alone watching it snow and staying up to hear the famous ringing of the bells at midnight.
And then the phone rang.
