My Beautiful Man

“Da da da da duh; da da da da da da da duh”

“If I have to listen to that music one more minute, I’m going to go stark raving mad,” I say to Jane, who is hanging around my information booth on the third floor of the Harvard Coop. It is the spring of 1967 and the movie A Man and a Woman is the hit of the season. The sound track continuously wafts up from Records on the floor below.

Luckily the phone rings and it is my beautiful man, calling to order books for his poetry class. “Saved by the bell,” I mouth to Jane, and she moves back to her customer service desk where a couple of professorial types have been impatiently waiting.

My beautiful man, as I have taken to calling this disembodied voice on the phone teaches a poetry class to Harvard undergraduates, and he is continually searching out obscure eighteenth century volumes. Many are them are out of print, so we need to talk a lot.

What is beautiful about him is his voice. It is a voice of no accent, but of many tones, with notes of taffy being gently pulled or butter as it is churned from white to gold. His voice pours into my ears and the sound of A Man and a Woman is erased.

All that spring he calls, but he never comes in. The maddening music plays downstairs, the hairy eyebrowed professors come and go; students rush about noisily looking for this or that textbook, counting crumpled dollar bills in front of the bored cashier. The boss, a thin man of about fifty, with a military hair cut and an unfortunate resemblance to my high school vice principal Mr. Lister, pops in and out of his back office, just to make sure the employees aren’t goofing off.

If I am on the phone talking to my beautiful man, whose name I have learned after several months, is Bill, he seems to know and starts walking in my direction. “I have to go,” I say, hanging up. How does he know that wasn’t just another customer on the line, I think; is he listening in on an extension? I never find out.

I couldn’t tell you today what I talked about with the beautiful man on the phone; he could have been reciting Keats or reading recipes from the Joy of Cooking.  All that mattered was the voice.  The voice on the phone, Jane’s penchant for gigantic sundaes and the astronomy class I audited at Harvard during lunchtime were all that kept me from diving down the up escalator to throttle whoever kept playing that maddening music.

At night, I would wander Harvard Square and down to the River with the marijuana smoking young men who may or may not have been students. David Lettvin, whose mother was Maggie of Maggie and the Beautiful Machine, an exercise show on WGBH; J.R. Getsinger, whose father worked with Timothy Leary on early LSD experiments or so he said; Vernon, with the bent in half wife; not a single boyfriend in the bunch. 

Or I would go to a class in Creative Writing with a teacher named Ken at the Cambridge Adult School who would openly sneer at my writing as adolescent drivel. “Thank you Ms. LeMieux, for sharing that adolescent drivel with the class.” It made me want to scream, but I kept at it, revising and redoing  late at night hunched over the portable typewriter I’d dragged with me from the dorm when I made the big move that spring from Christian College girl to Cambridge hippy chick.

Or I would attend classes in film-making at the Boston Cinemateque, where I saw my first “art film” with Helaine Haaland, the night I got caught sneaking back into the dorm at Gordon College, only months before, and where you could take out 8 millimeter cameras and make any kind of film you wanted, if you paid for the film. 

I still have a film made at a be-in in the Cambridge Common, me in a striped sailor’s shirt I associated with what beatniks wore, sitting on the grass, making a peace sign with two fingers, long hair, eternally young. One of the Harvard Square boys, no doubt, on the other end of that camera. And once I made a film with my friend Naomi from Brockton, after a night spent in her Volkswagon beetle near the shore on Cape Cod. The film was of a lonely boy, just wandering the dawn streets of a still deserted beach town, hands in the pocket of his pea coat, Beatle haircut, impossibly young. We saw the boy when we climbed, tousled out of the car, unkinked our legs an turned on the camera. We asked him to wander for us and he complied, it was what he was doing anyway. We rolled the film. The boy has now wandered off into memory, along with the film.

One day as the music plays, I hear someone coming up the escalator. At the top he stops and looks around, a large man around thirty with shaggy not entirely clean brown hair, a square face, pale complexion. He wears an army surplus jacket. “Jane, it’s him” I whisper. Jane looks up from where she has been leaning on counter and is not impressed, he eyes slanted, her lips pressed tightly together. “A peon,” she  turns away.

Then he opens his mouth and says my name. It is of course him. It is he. He is him. “I thought I’d come see where my books live,” he says, smiling through crooked teeth.

“This is Jane,” I say, indicating. 

“Hello,” she says in her icy voice, already back at her desk in Customer Service.   Jane’s high standards and pronouncements of “peonism” notwithstanding,  little pit-a-pats are alive in my chest; he looks just like his voice, and that makes him just about perfect.

He doesn’t stay long. Jane wanders back once he has gone and says, “Not much to look at is he?”

“Jane, he’s beautiful!” 

“Kind of unwashed looking,” she answers, mouth turning down. “Let’s go get a Bailey’s sundae.”

He continues to call that summer, then one day asks if I would like to babysit for him and his wife. Oh, his wife.  “Oh his wife” says Jane when I tell her. “Will you do it?”

“Sure, why not. I’m curious about the wife,” I reply.

So it comes to pass that I go to the home of the beautiful man and I meet the wife. I meet the kids, and I meet the dirty dishes in the sink, the overgrown weeds in the lawn and the springs in the sofa. 

I do not go back, and the rest of the summer, I just sigh and cover my ears until the music changes to the next popular sound track. When the “Beautiful man” calls, I treat him just like any other customer. He never comes back into the store.

Brian and Billy - My High School Dilemma

The summer before my senior year of high school I went back and forth between Brian, the bad boy from two towns over, and Billy, the good boy from Church. I met Brian through his cousin Elaine, who taught me to shoplift the bright colored enamel daisy rings that were so popular that year, from Russem’s department store in Lawrence. You stood with a group of girls admiring the ring display and trying on one or another, until your hand found its way into the pocket of your jeans and came out ringless. No one ever got caught.

The main problem with Brian was one of logistics. Since he did not have access to a car, his mother, dubbed “dragon lady” by Elaine, had to drive him to meet me on Tuesday nights when all the kids from three towns gathered in downtown Lawrence, to look each other over, eat pizza at Sal’s or try on costume jewelry at Russems. 

On Saturdays we went to matinees and necked in the balcony, until it was time for the “dragon lady” to pick him up at the appointed hour.  She did not approve of either Elaine or me.

Billy, on the other hand, had his own car and no curfew. He didn’t need one, because he was a church going boy like most of the kids we hung around with.  Even Elaine was a regular at the Catholic Church around the corner from my grandmother’s house on Albemarle Street. The Catholic Church I learned was more forgiving than the protestant one. 

“I go to confession every week,” said Elaine. “You should try it. All your sins are washed away.”

St. George’s Ebenezer Primitive Methodist Church may not have had confession, but it did have a blind guitar playing minister, which leant it a sort of cool. Billy also played guitar and lots of the kids from church went to hootenannies and listened to folk music records. Billy especially loved Tom Rush and took me to Cambridge to hear him at my first coffee house, Club 47, on Palmer Street, in back of the Harvard Cooperative Society or “Coop” as everyone called it, where I would have my first real job in textbooks when I finally I leave the Church and the Christian College I followed Billy to on Boston’s North Shore the next year. 

But for now, I am torn between inaccessible Brian and right-there with a car Billy. Billy wins out. I am still friends with Elaine however, and make regular excursions on Tuesday night shoplifting expeditions. That is until the night I, gloating, show Billy that week’s loot in the church parking lot. 

He snatches the ring off my finger and throws it out the window.

“What did you do that for?” I ask, truly surprised.

“We’re Christians; we don’t steal things!”

“Elaine is a Christian, too,” I protest.

“Elaine is a Catholic, and a thief.” 

“It’s just a little ring,” I pout.

“Look, do you want a ring? Here take this one.”

He pulls his own class ring off his finder and hands it too me. Of course it is too big, but I know I can put twine around it to make it fit. “Does this mean we are going steady?”

So all that year Billy and I go steady, Brian and Elaine left behind. I attend church regularly, I don’t shoplift anymore. When I go downtown to Russem’s Department Store, it is to convince Billy to buy paisley shirts and tight pants made out some kind of rough cloth that I have learned from the Sunday supplement, is what the cool kids wear. On one of our trips to Boston, I see a girl with straw colored hair playing Frisbee on the Boston University campus. I don’t know what we are doing there, maybe a Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell concert? but the girl stuck in my head, and I still think of her as if she were calling to me that day and it just took a while to answer her.

Because the backdrop to everything that year was the War in Vietnam (kids I knew were graduating and going into the army, or their draft number would soon come up), I was terrified for Billy. I also had discovered the anti-war movement through the music we listened to, Bob Dylan of course, but also Pete Seeger and Phil Oaks. The summer between high school graduation and college, I found an address in Cambridge where they counseled kids facing the draft and I sent away for the Conscientious Objector’s Handbook. I knew I was a pacifist. It did seem like the Christian way to be, after all. I gave the book to Billy who promised to read it, but I hadn’t counted on his patriot parents, his dad a World War II vet.  His home had always been open to me, lots of family dinners with his little brother and sister. Everyone assumed we’d get married after college, have kids, be a part of their extended family.

But that all changed when they found the book. Suddenly I was no longer welcome; Billy returned the book, “I guess they’re not ready for this,” he said apologetically. 

We never talked about it again, but we did start to drift apart. By the end of the first trimester of College, we had broken up completely. By the end of the year, I was through with college and the Church. The Frisbee playing girl beckoned to me, along with the draft counseling storefront on Massachusetts Avenue. (or Mass. Ave. ; Cambridge loves its shorthand).

Once I had taken up residence on Kinnaird Street, with Wendy and Steve, I stopped in at that storefont eager to volunteer.  A young man looks up from he seems to be packing up a box of books as I enter. Is his hair black, does he wear glasses and a white shirt? Or are these false memories of what I think he should look like, earnest, true believer, peaceful. 

What I do remember is this: The empty booksheles and bare desktop. He was indeed leaving, getting ready to bolt the doors, not for the night, but forever. He was going somewhere, back to Kansas? Back to school? To Canada? To jail? He said, “I was just closing down, but if you want, you can take over. It’s all yours. Do you want me to leave some of the books?”  I look down to see piles of the Conscientious Objectors Handbook strewn on the floor, filling the boxes.  

“But I’m only 18,” I say. “There must be rent. Who pays the rent?” I whine.  He shrugs and continues packing.

As for Billy, he married the girl down the hall from me in the freshman dorm, the one who pierced my ears with a sewing needle and an ice cube, and became a minister, thus avoiding the War without cutting himself off from his parents. I never saw him again. Brian, however, did turn up not very long after that, and things were quite different this time around.

Memoir Writing Class

Digression into the present -

So now I am attending a memoir writing class.  When I enter the classroom on the second floor of the Fine Arts building at the College of Marin, I see a lot of white and gray mostly female heads with peekaboo scalps. You can tell the men from the women because their heads are mostly bald. Also there aren’t nearly so many of them. 

“It's me and a bunch of old ladies,” I tell Sandra over lunch later that week. Sandra is a writer too, a poet I’ve known for forty years when we first took a class in Berkeley. Later we resumed our get-togethers sporadically. Now she has a book of poems coming out and she complains to me about the slowness of the publication process.  Me, I’m stuck in a memoir writing class with other “Emeritus” (read over 55) students and we don’t even get college credits for it.   

“I assume they’re mostly retired,” I say to Sandra, unless some of them are self-employed like I am. She asks about the teacher. “She gives us writing assignments; we’re supposed to bring in thirty copies so all the other students can have one. Then she calls on a few people to read theirs out loud.”

Why do we have to make thirty copies, I wonder, when we could just email our stories to thirty students?  Wouldn't that be easier and better for not destroying trees, wasting paper, and the time it takes to physically make thirty copies, jamming copier and all?

The teacher has a philosophy that reminds me of kindergarten. No hitting, play nicely. Stop rolling your eyes. Share.

So we are instructed to only give constructive criticism, there are three approved methods of feedback:

1.    What did you especially like about the story (the ones that are read aloud by the author, which average about one and a half pages each.  Easier to copy I suppose and definitely to listen to, besides more people get to share)

2.    What would you like to have learned more about?

3.    What was unclear to you?

The first story is about a woman's trip to Florence and what she ate. Also that she walked around alone at night and did not get molested.  

Anyway, she survived, had a great time and even touched the foot of David, the statue, not some young guy in the plaza, which seriously might have made for a more interesting story.

Slowly the students start to speak up. Some liked the way they could see the diners in the posh restaurant, smell the spicy Italian food going by as the waiters made their way among the cramped tables, hear the cutlery against the fine china. Even feel the foot of the statue David.

The teacher Sandra and I had back in the day also did not want to hurt the students’ feelings, but that was because many of them were from the Inner City, all were young, and most of the poetry, if not good, was dark. I don’t think even then we had to make thirty copies. It would be too depressing. Anyway, no one had been to Florence, just to Oakland.

I remember another class I took when I first moved to Cambridge in the sixties, at the Cambridge Adult School.

The teacher’s name was Ken and he was not into constructive criticism. He was into sneering and if you wrote a piece of adolescent drivel, he said so. “Well, so you think you're a writer Miss LeMieux?  Why then do you turn in a piece of adolescent drivel like this?”

Try again.

I'm not going to say this made me a better writer.  It mostly made me hate Ken and his perfectionism and obvious lack of literary taste.

But I did go back to my portable typewriter on my “desk” made out of a door and some old concrete blocks beside my mattress on the floor. I typed out draft after draft as I struggled to rise above myself.

I was determined to reach the heights of adult drivel, at the very least.

Now I am attaining old age drivel with thirty other would be memoir writers. I know memoirs are all the rage, but mostly they are being written by young people, with colorful recent pasts filled with drugs or other addictions of various sorts. Many of them write about abusive parents or binge marriages   And they are mostly famous already for daring TV series or walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls.

Me I'm just an ordinary person, still trying to eke out a living in my sixties and I’ve never been to Florence.