Brian Jones and Big Fat Brenda

One day a fat girl on the fringes of our little rebellious teenage crowd of losers, shoplifters and uncool hipsters announced she was dating Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

"Oh, yeah, sure you are, and I'm dating Paul McCartney," said Elaine, the coolest one of the crowd, the one who taught me the sleight of hand in Russem's that netted the daisy ring that my boyfriend, Christian Billy, made me throw away in the parking lot of the church. But this was before that, before I met Billy and the Church and folk music.

The girl, was her name Brenda? said, in a very smug way for a fat girl, "Yes, I am too, and i can prove it."

"Prove it," challenged Elaine. And we all echoed, "Prove it, prove it."

How would fat Brenda even get to meet, let lone date Brian Jones, or any of the Rolling Stones, or any boy of interest at all for that matter? I wondered. I knew the Stones had been in Boston the previous week, and I had not been able to see them, because of no money and no ride, and so forth. But others went, including Elaine and fat Brenda, although they did not go together. They were not really friends, and Elaine had her eyes out for boyfriend prospects all the time, especially ones that lived out of town, and did not want someone like Brenda holding her back, someone fat and unhip and needy.

Brenda was on a roll, "Doncha want to know how I met him?" she demanded, petulantly. Sure, sure, but get to the good part, the proving part.

So she told us. She went to the concert with some older girls from another town. Head nodding and eyerolling from Elaine. Older girls taking Brenda anywhere? Unless it was her older, fatter sister Betsy, forced to take Brenda by their enormously fat mother, Bernice. Bernice was so fat, she waddled in the aisles of Karls' market, obliterating the shopping cart, which was inevitably piled high with frozen TV dinners, on top of big tubs of ice cream and gargantuan sides of beef, or so it seemed.

Brenda ignored our disbelief and told how she and the older girls went to the side door after the show to catch the Stones as they left.

"Everybody goes to the side door, stupid," interrupted Elaine. "All the cute girls from Boston go there and flash their panties for the stars; they're all groupies and Brian Jones could have his pick of any of them. Especially the Catholic girls. They put out the most. Everyone knows that."

Well, except for me. I was shocked to hear that anyone our age "put out" even for big British rock stars. But then, the logic of what Elaine was saying struck me. It wasn't the putting out, it was the fact that Brian Jones could have his pick of the cutest, sexiest, fastest girls in the whole Boston area, and would never in a million years choose fat Brenda, whose panties must be the size of one of her mother's two gallon tubs of ice cream.

But Brenda was undeterred by our skepticism and continued her tale of meeting Brian outside the Music Hall where he chose her over all the skinny, loose Catholic girls because he could tell she had "soul." Not for Brian the one night stand, the one hour, stand in the dressing room, before the girl's parents sent her older brothers scouting for her. No, Brenda would be a real girlfriend, someone he could talk to, could count on to wait for him between performance, be a soft landing after the grueling road trips.

Soft landing indeed. Maybe he liked them round and plump, fat. Fat Fat the Water Rat, we used to chant, and never knew it was a song by Dave Van Ronk. Only years later did I Google it. A word, a process not invented or dreamed of outside of unknown to us computer laboratories that even then were springing up along Highway 128.

So Brenda set up a little proof for her doubting Thomasina friends. We all gathered at Elaine's house one evening with Brenda, who had arranged for Brian to call us. Right on time, the phone rang and Elaine jumped for it before her mother could get the extension, "Got it Mom!" she yelled.

Then silence, as she listened, her eyes growing round, head nodding. "Here," she handed the phone to me, "Hello doll," said a distinctly British accent. Too British I thought. Fake.

"Who is this?" I blurted out.

"It's me, Brian," said the voice.

"No, really who is it?"

"I'm Brian, Brian bleeding Jones," getting impatient.

Girls were jostling for their turn, while Brenda looked annoyed. She grabbed the phone out of my hand. "HI Brian," she listened and giggled, and turned to give me a dirty look. "Elaine believes you," she said into the mouthpiece

Elaine was looking less sure by the second. "What do you think?" I whispered to her, as other hands snatched the phone away from Brenda's ear.

"It could be her cousin. He went to England last year."

"I think he sounded fake. I mean, Brian Jones and Brenda!?" I gestured toward her sprawled across Elaine's pink sateen bedspread like a beached whale.

"I dunno."

We never did find out if it was really Brian Jones that fall of 1965. There were no more phone calls but Brenda went on mysterious overnights and told her mother she was staying with Elaine, until in early 1966, coinciding with the end of the Stones' American tour, she said, "Brain's gone back to England. I guess he's gone," and sighed a very large sigh and asked, "Anyone want ice cream?"

In 1969 Brian Jones died, drowned in his swimming pool, one month after being replaced by Mick Taylor in the band. Or was his heart broken by a fat girl named Brenda in Methuen Massachusetts in the fall of 1965, and he just never got over it?

Folk Music and Me -a High School Romance

Folk Music

Everybody in my high school crowd was into folk music. We played guitars, and sang Bob Dylan tunes and Peter Paul and Mary tunes and Joan Baez tunes and my boyfriend Billy was obsessed with Tom Rush, who lived in Cambridge, so was close enough to go see a lot. We both liked Tom Rush, but he was in love with him, like a total crush. I was more in love with Cambridge itself and the Club 47 where we went to see Tom Rush, and later, Joni Mitchell, who was from Canada and a compete unknown, until Tom Rush brought her to the US, after introducing her songs to the Club 47 crowd over the past year. The Club 47 was dimly lit, with a tiny stage and really teeny tiny little tables with candles in old Chianti bottles, so the place always smelled of wax. We drank grenadine, a red drink made of pomegranates, which was the thing to drink while listening to folk music. They didn’t serve alcohol in the Club 47; at least not that I can remember, but then I was a Christian teenager from a dying mill town and what did I know?

My Birthday Surprise

On my birthday one year, Billy said he had a surprise for me; we were going somewhere for a great surprise. So excited, we headed off to the east and I tried to imagine what my surprise would be; this was great. Billy even brought clean clothes home from the shoe factory where he was working for the summer; all the kids worked in the factory during the summer between high school and college, so they’d have some money to start off with; and he changed in my kitchen.

We finally reached the destination, a cool looking club in the home of the Ipswich clam, Ipswich. I was sure we were seeing some famous act, Bob Dylan, or Pete Seeger, or maybe Peter Paul and Mary. One summer night we had gone to Canobie Lake Park, a really seedy amusement park in New Hampshire, and were thrilled to be entertained by Sonny and Cher singing I Got You Babe. My expectations were high.

So when we stood outside the ticket window of the small, out of the way club, and I saw that the headliner for the night was Tom Rush, I completely lost it. And not in a good way.

“Tom Rush is my birthday surprise!?” I hissed not under my breath at all, as we moved up the line toward the ticket window. “This isn’t any kind of surprise; we see Tom Rush all the time.” I whined. I stomped my feet. I was disappointed. Billy was embarrassed that his girlfriend was pitching a fit in front of the fans. I had never heard of “groupies" in those days, but that’s what Billy was, and he thought I was too, but I wasn’t. Tom Rush was all right and Joni Mitchell was even better, but not a birthday surprise. 

I can’t remember if we stayed for the show or not, but we didn’t stay together as a couple past the first trimester of college.

Hosting the Folkies

 

However this story is about something else, another time Billy and I went to a concert, a show, at the Club 47, where we usually saw Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell, or both together, the first time we saw Joni Mitchell, it was both together. This time we knew that Sandy and Jeanie Darlington were coming and we for some reason - what reason? who knows? That’s just something you say when you can’t remember what could have possessed you to do such a reckless thing - for some reason, we wrote to them and said we’d like to take them to dinner before the show. And they replied. They accepted the dinner invitation, so we had to do it; two high school students, going to dinner with big time folk musicians! We took them to some kind of hofbrau type place in Harvard Square, where the food was hearty and cheap, and Germanic if I recall. 

We tried to act cool and look older. And they were totally gracious, pretending they went to dinner with high school age fans all the time, acting like we knew what and who they were talking about, as they discussed their act and the other musicians who'd influenced them, asking us who we liked. They even let us pay for dinner without making the usual adult fuss or giving each other knowing looks over the bill.

Other than those details, which are seared on my brain, I don't remember a thing about the meal; or the concert afterward. This was my first encounter with famous people.

Except of course for Brian Jones. But that must wait for the next chapter.

Tom Hale

I never knew what Tom Hale did, really did, for a living. I knew he owned a card shop called Green's where grandmotherly old lady with white hair waited on customers, one, two a day, tops. Old lady, not grandmotherly but Moberly, married to the mob, old lady widow of Mob boss, working for a living, or more likely, charitable intervention of Tom Hale.

The building stood on aide street Boston, all canyons and dark, a bagel shop across the street, around the corner, the Park Street Station and the Common, around the other Raymond's "Where you bot the hat."

Up some narrow stairs to Dotty's Balcony, where sat I, young and dumped by blonde Rick, who, up another flight of stairs ran the head shop; paraphernalia that sold only marginally better than cards, then junk in the balcony cracked glass case.

Tom Hale, who was he, then, and later, when still performing charity, he took in the homeless, the in-between boyfriends and jobs and mothers, the post-Sanctuary Bill Chase and post Resistance Walrus, with his droopy mustache and, heaving chest, from climbing two, three, four flights of stairs to narrow, dark, rooms over snow bound Boston streets.

It was winter 1968 or '69. No apologies for the way dates and events get scrambled over years and miles and people lost and found and brain cells rearranged by drugs and time and straining to remember, just a story without an end.

Tom Hale, Peter Pan to lost boys, and girls, who once said, "here is a new thing we are trying out; it could be big, it could be marketable," and me, gullible, popping purple pill in my mouth, thinking, why would anyone want to take their wine in tablet form, and miss the ritual, passed bottle, or paper cups, with company on couches, is the point.

And then trails of colors and laughing and impish grins told the truth, and ok, it was fun to trip with friends in comfortable, wintry Boston, with history heaped upon history and Revolutionary soldiers, padding on ghostly feet down cobblestones and up these very stairs maybe, hiding and taking careful aim from windows at advancing redcoats, never mind the building we imagined was not the same as the one we inhabited, 100 years or so too late.

There were meeting with ragged haired men in clerical collars, with earnest faced youth, and elderly friends of the Mayor, when I was sent to Raymond's for provisions, and history was being made. And Tom Hale just shrugged when asked, and the men spoke in hushed tones, coming and going and every time, I am sent for provisions.

Then, in the way of youth, new callings, new boyfriends, my own politics, Women's Liberation, and moving in with new friends, taking new job with newspaper back to Cambridge where I started the journey. And disloyal, I drop Tom Hale from memory until years later, a vague reference to disappearance - int jail, death, the backwoods of Vermont, witness protection? I never knew. I want to.

Spring Tableaux!

One day Jane and Damien and I found some thrown away bits of window dressing from one of the downtown department stores. Filene's or Jordan's. Fake branches and flower parts, very well used. Stomped on twigs, maybe a bird's nest. Just the ticket for our Spring Tableaux.

Spring Tableaux was what you did when, bored, you borrowed someone's top vent VW bug and crowded inside with your fake greenery and drove through the streets of Boston's labyrinthine downtown.

Who drove? Was it Jane, with her mouth full of mystery, her eyes full of spying, her throaty cackle of delight, head thrown back, laughter like the smallest living animals freed from between her lips to sail toward the Heavens? Or was it Damien? he of the wispy beard and imp's small toothed grin, hair flying out the window in the faintest scented spring breezes. It could have been me, with no skills, lurching the clutch, pounding the brakes, sending them all flying and the decorations to, toward certain fateful collisions and policemen's Irish disappointment.

But no, not I that day in spring, as the car glided, not hunched along, the narrow Boston streets, no longer cobblestone, not where the stores were, the big department stores, with their multiple basements, each one cheaper and darker and less civilized then the last, like the deepest darkest circles of Dante's Hell. Only on this earth and voluntarily entered for purposes of bargains. Women with arm wattles elbowing each other for the choicest spring frocks, wrinkled and worn and tossed on heaps, dressing and undressing right there in the warm bowels of basement no. 3, young extra-hire clerks busily stuffing bags full of treasures hidden under counters and down underfilled bras and hips and crotches of clothing.

It was April in Boston; cherries budded and robins breasted and VW bugs sprouted garlanded plastic branches through their sun roofs, while we three leaned out of windows and chortled "Spring Tableaux! Spring Tableaux" to the imagined delight of passersby on their frenzied way to shopping Nirvana.

The exorcism

If I had any doubts about leaving the Christian College for Cambridge, the exorcism quelled them all. The whole dorm was abuzz about Christine, a usually quiet girl with good christian clothes and serious Christian hair. What was the matter with Christine? She wasn't quiet anymore. She had a look in her eye. She let her hair escape the bounds of her head and go all flyaway. her clothes looked slept in.

The whispering started in my dorm room. I shared with three earnest young women who liked going to chapel, even cute Kathy, who could date any boy on campus, but stayed true to her high school sweetheart, studying theology in another state. I don't remember them discussing it with me, but I heard them discussing it, like the three witches, from my top bunk. Above me was a bright yellow square of cardboard taped to the ceiling, in its center a small magenta square with a question mark. My attempt at abstract art.

I was the questioner. They were believers and I was spinning away from the well honed system. I heard them talking,"She's possessed of the Devil." "Yes, we have to do something." "It's so sad; let's pray."

They prayed, they did it in another room, having attracted a large following among the other students from our dorm, then from other dorms, then they brought in the teachers and preachers. There was going to be an exorcism.

Did anyone tell Christine? I never found out if she knew what was going on before it happened. I stayed in my top bunk and contemplated my question mark; it was early spring, the cherry trees were in bloom, the ice on the pond had long since made way for geese. I was busy composing the ad that would take me out of this holy madhouse and to the real world where I belonged, the world of hippies and folk music and civil rights.

The funny thing is I can't remember if they ever actually held the exorcism. I remember thinking "Isn't that a Catholic thing?" and "Maybe the poor girl needs a shrink, not an exorcist." And the movie hadn't even come out yet. When I think about Gordon College this is what I think about:

Ice skating on the frozen pond behind the school

Giving boys backrubs with the lights out in the small anteroom off the lounge in the student center, until they fixed the lights to be permanently on.

Getting my ears pierced by Vicki down the hall, who would later marry my old boyfriend Billy. She used a sewing needle and thread, and an ice cube.

Singing out for the weekend with Helaine Haaland who lived off campus, saying we were going to stay with her aunt and really going to Boston, where I first met Beatle and saw my first "art film" Wild Strawberries.

Getting caught sneaking into the dorm that same night because we didn't have anything to do after the movie and staying at the Y seemed dreary.

Shannon, my dream crush, who asked me out, but the day we were supposed to go on our date, it snowed so hard you couldn't get out of the dorm, and the next day he was sent away for stealing $200 from the tract box. He turned up two years later in Boston. (More about that in another episode.)

The exorcism and how it propelled me out of the school and out of the faith forever.

Flashback - to the Fifties

Life Lessons

So I was ten and gawky and shy but also pretty darned snotty, and when Anita Grintals and I got together we were naughty. Not juvenile delinquent naughty, but we liked to play pranks. We called drugstores and asked if they had Prince Albert in a can, then if they said yes, we’d shout, well let him out! And cackle like crazy.

But we didn’t stop there, we also did the is your refrigerator running, and yelled, well go catch it! Ha ha . And most fun of all, we’d dial randomly and when someone answered, one of us, the one not on the phone would shout out from the background “George. Get off of me!” That was a hoot. We loved that one, little snots that we were, until one day the person on the other didn’t hang up and the line stayed open and we were sure that he was having the call traced and the police would be at our door any minute.

We never did that again.

One day that year we were ten, Anita Grintals and I made fun of some teenage girls, heavy and coarse looking, three of them sitting on a wall near the school smoking. We probably said they were fat. We were ten, ok? Well, we ran off, thinking we were very clever, and oh, no, there they were, at the top of the hill, big, heavy girls, with sneers, ugly mean girls, they herded us back down behind the school, No one else was around. It was a Saturday. My house was over the hill, through the woods, a small copse actually, but who knew from copses in those days?

We were on our way home and didn’t make it. Lost ground, backed against the back brick wall of the elementary school. By three very large ugly mean, cigarette smoking teenage girls. The biggest meanest one took out after me. I knew she would kills me, she would smash me flat with her big meaty hands. Her friends would stand there laughing and Anita was helpless. The other two surrounded her; so big so huge and overarching were they, there wasn’t even room to take a breath. I’m lucky I didn’t pee my pants.

“What did you call us?” big mean no. one tough growled at me. I squirmed, looking for a way out, for a teacher, for the principal, a parent, another kid, anybody. There wasn’t anybody, not even a dog, I mean, who but us, would nag out by the elementary school on a Saturday?

“Well,” she was growing impatient. “Uh I don’t know,” Yes you d, you called us fat, didn’t you? You sad we were fat.”

The other two chiming in, their low voices menacing, “You’re a brat. You don’t know anything. We’re not fat. We’re big and hard and tough. We can beat you up.”

I think Anita did pee her pants.

We were cornered, alone in the school yard with the schoolyard bullies. These girls were way too old to be at the elementary school. Do they routinely hang around loking for little kids to beat up?

We were surrounded; we couldn’t run away, even if w weren’t so scared our legs turned to jelly. What would they do. The biggest one, the leader of the pack, the bully in chief, took pity on us, or so we thought, naïve little girls that we were. “Wait, girls,” she said to her pals, who were rolling up their sleeves to pound lumps on us. “Let’s let these kids go.” The other two looked really disappointed, like they were hoping to smash some prepubescent bones today.

“No,” the big one said, pinching my delicate little arm, “we’ll let hem go after this one,” she pinched harder, “kisses my big fat butt.”

Oh, gross, I thought, help, Mommy, let me out of here. Anita backed away; they weren’t holding her arm anymore. Another one grabbed me, as the big one turned around, bent over and then looking coyly over shoulder, said, ‘Well, I’m waiting. Or would you rather get beat up.” Why do these things always happen to me? I thought, giving up all hope of squirming out of this one. She spanked herself n the butt. “I’m waiting.” The other two were cackling like the demented teenage torturers that they were, as I took a deep breath and held my breath as I bent over and touched my lips, as delicately as I could, as if I was kissing the papery skin of my medicinal smelling grandmother, and vowed to wash out my own mouth with soap if I got home alive.

Me and Jesus and Bobby

Once I had settled into life with Bobby as my steady boyfriend, no more enamel rings, no more Kevin in the movie theatre, no more AJ's Pizza, I needed to get a good routine going.

Bobby was a regular in the church. He sang in the choir. I mentioned Bobby before. I mentioned the Church. It seems so unreal, so un-me, that I can't stop obsessing. Whatever happened to Bobby, the Church, Vicki, the girl down the hall in my dormitory who later married Bobby, but then I get ahead of myself and trip over my thoughts.

Bobby and I and Mary Ellen Pooters and Marine Hoogasian all hung around together and played folk music. We liked Bob Dylan, but called him Die-lan. We were so dumb.

We went to Sunday School and we all sang in the choir, where I was made to stand next to Mary Ellen Pooters and follow her lead, and not too loud, thanks.

And Christmas Eve we sang Christmas carols to the old folks at the old folks home, which is what it was in those days, the very old building where the very old folks went to languish. We were their only joy.

We also sang to my mother and little sister, because they didn't have a lot of joy either.

One day we found out in Sunday School that we each had to take a turn "preaching" a youth sermon to the whole congregation. We had to stand up before "God and everyone" and say we accepted Jesus as our personal savior.

What else? I don't remember. I practiced over and over, Jesus is my personal savior. What does mean? It means if you don't believe it when you say it, Jesus won't save you when the time comes, and after you languish in the old folks home, you languish some more while all your friends go up to Heaven and sit on the right hand of God, which must be a pretty big right hand or else they are not telling us how hard it really is to qualify for the right hand seat.

So I said to myself, not unlike Dorothy, "I do believe, I do I do, I do believe" that Jesus is my personal savior and etc. without crossing my fingers. It was a rite of passage, if I wanted to stay in the Church and eventually marry Bobby and so forth. Which I thought I did, but would have taken an out if one offered itself.

No out was in sight when it was my turn to stand up before he congregation and proclaim that I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.

Lightning didn't strike me, so I figured that was a good sign. I was always very superstitious.