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.