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.

THE INCIDENT IN THE LOFT

“I guess the whole town knows about that already,” says Shawnda the morning after Robert threw out his back and had to be hoisted out of my loft by the Fire Department.

“Well, I certainly didn’t tell anyone,” I object, “except you and you don’t even live here, and of course Arliss because her house is attached to mine and with the Fire Department showing up in her driveway, she could hardly miss it.”

“And Daphne too, didn’t you tell her.”

“Well, Daphne, of course; She knew Robert knew when we all lived in Berkeley. I couldn’t not tell her.”

“Well, I heard it from my friend Sylvia and she doesn’t live there either, but she heard it from her friend Mavis.”

“The poet?”

“Yes, and so you know that Joanne has heard it and every other poet and probably the ladies at the Post Office.”

“Oh, they know everything.”

“There you are.”

“Sylvia told you even before I did?” It is only 10 AM the next morning and how can word travel that fast?

“Yes, Mavis' husband is a volunteer firefighter.”

“Oh, those guys are not supposed to talk.”

I can hear Shawnda rolling her eyes over the phone.

Robert and I hadn’t lived together for almost a year. In fact, I had taken to calling him Ex-Robert, but not to his face. 

The night he got stuck in the loft was the first time we had been together since we split up. He was now living in his own second unit behind the house of the people who had the little orchestra he played in. 

Robert was a classical oboist. He taught music at the small school in town and had recently started playing with a small orchestra put together by Mr. Coyle, whose house he lived in back of. The Coyles had moved here from Mill Valley, so practices were often held at one of the other members’ homes “over the hill.” This was a big deal, especially if it was raining, or foggy on the mountain and sometimes you couldn’t see any more than one reflector in the middle of the road at a time. 

Robert had been at a practice on one of those foggy nights the night he stopped by my refurbished garage. Arliss had done the remodeling herself, after being trained by Art Carpenter in the Women’s Carpentry Class a couple of years back, just before Robert and I moved from Berkeley to Benson, a small coastal town, off the map. Literally.

Robert was the very definition of long-suffering. I was not the perfect girlfriend. I had the occasional fling, when we lived in Berkeley, and later when I went with Arliss or Anabelle to Kingfisher’s after Water Board meetings because that was what you did for entertainment in those days.

Arliss was contemplating her own run and we had to check things out with her. No one wanted their very good friend and in my case landlady to make a big mistake.

So I drank and flirted and once or twice took a detour on my way home to visit a good looking author  or painter who invited me in for a nightcap we both knew wasn’t exactly what either of us had in mind.

Mostly I was a bad girlfriend because I kissed and told.

Finally, I decided it wasn’t fair to either Robert or me to go on as we were, so I moved out and he moved on.

We remained cordial when meeting in the street, or at one of the events held by the town; his orchestra played a few times at the community center and I always attended and clapped very loudly for him.

One night he knocks on my door at about 11 PM, having just returned from driving the harrowing narrow mountain road in a dense fog from a rehearsal in Mill Valley. Usually he rode with Mr. Coyle, but the Coyles were staying overnight to do some Hanukah shopping which meant he had to drive his own car, the clunker he brought from Berkeley. That he and the car had both made it in one piece apparently left him feeling grateful and that led to nostalgia which led to me.

For a nightcap.

Robert didn’t drink, but that wasn’t the point.

So I have wine, and he has sparkling cider and we both climb up the narrow ladder into my loft, with its mattress on the floor. Robert was and still is a substantial man. He huffs and puffs a little on his way up the ladder, and when it is time to go home some few hours later, he never even makes it off the mattress.

“My back!” he half-moans, half-screams. “My back just went out.”

“Well, don’t panic. Maybe just lie there a little while. I’ll get you some water.”

“Water? What for? I’m not thirsty. I’m in pain.”

“I’ll get an aspirin with the water.”

I scurry down the ladder to get the water and the aspirin. When I get back up there, Robert has turned on the light and looks pale.  

“You look pale,” I sat, unhelpfully.

“I can’t move,” he says back, grimacing.

“Drink this,” I offer him the aspirin and water. “You have to hold up your head,” I explain as if to a simpleton.

“I am holding up my head,” he retorts.

“Well not very far. Let me help you.” So I hold my hand under his head and hand him the aspirin and the water. Most of it goes everywhere but in his mouth. “You have to open your mouth.”

“It’s open,” he says between clenched teeth. Then, “I think I might be sick.”

Down the ladder I scurry again for a pot, just in case. He is now flat on his back, moaning and kind of wiggling.

“Maybe you need to lie still for a few minutes.”

“I am lying still.”

“No, you are wiggling.”

“I’m spasming.”

At least he isn’t heaving. 

“Has this ever happened before?”

“Once, a couple of months ago. It took a couple of days to get better. Then I had acupuncture.”

“You should have told me this could happen.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I wasn’t even planning to come here.”

Robert is now sweating and looking a little green under the pale.   “I think we better call someone to get you out of here.”

“Who?”

“I dunno, the fire department?”

He groans. Back down the ladder I go. The fire department’s number is in the Benson directory, under Services. It rings at the chief’s house.

“Hello,” a sleepy deep voice answers on only the second ring.

“Sorry to wake you up; I have someone stuck in a loft, who maybe needs to be lifted out. Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” he says not sounding surprised. “I’ll send some of my guys. Where are you?”

I tell him and go back to check on Robert who has stopped wiggling.

“Robert, are you still alive?”

“I think so.”

“They’re coming; Chief Sanchez is sending some of his guys.”

No moans anymore. I hope they come soon. Can you die from throwing out your back? And how did he throw it out? I don’t think we had been that energetic.

When the fire department comes with lights but no sirens thank goodness, Arliss is already out of bed and standing in her nightgown and flapping robe, squinting at the sight. Her young son Gus is there too, wide eyed. Arliss is squinting because she won’t wear her eyeglasses when anyone except immediate family is around. I must count as family, because I’ve seen her in the thick lensed blue plastic jobbies many times. Without them she is blind as the proverbial bat, and usually wears contact lenses. Tonight she clearly has not had time to put them in. Her vanity does not extend to her dress however, and the shapeless nightgown and robe are not flattering to her thin frame.

“What’s going on,” she asks, looking toward my garage unit, and sniffing, obviously trying not to panic.

“There’s no fire, nothing like that; sorry to get you out of bed. Robert got stuck in the loft.”

“Stuck?”

“His back went out, he can’t move.”

“Robert was in your loft?”

The firemen are carrying in a backboard now.

“How will they get him out? What was he doing here?”

I shrug; the vertical ladder from the concrete floor to the loft will not make it easy. Maybe they can hand him down, in an upright position.

Arliss and I go in to watch the progress. She pulls out her glasses from the pocket of her robe; this is too good to miss. Besides what if there’s a terrible mishap and she’s liable as the owner of the house, and the building of the lot, without benefit of permits?

Two of the men are rolling Robert onto the backboard now, I can tell by their heaving bodies visible from below and the grunts from Robert who is not.

Finally, they attach a sort of pulley mechanism to the board and secure it over one of the exposed beams. 

“Good thing you didn’t finish the ceiling,” I say to Arliss.

Now they are lowering the board with Robert secured to it down slowly to the waiting team below. Everyone is holding their breath, even Gus, who has gone slackjawed at the sight.

When they get him down without mishap, we breathe; Robert looks relieved; I pat his hand as they slide the backboard into the back of a waiting ambulance we hadn’t heard drive up behind the firetruck. 

“Are you taking him to the hospital?” I ask one of the paramedics.

“I think it’s a good idea; he probably should have xrays.”

“I just need some rest,” Robert protests from the back of the ambulance, still unable to raise his head.

“I think that’s a good idea,” I say still to the paramedics. “Robert, do you want me to come?

The hospital is “over the hill” a long bumpy ride back over the same foggy mountain road Robert had driven only a few hours earlier.

“No,” he says, ”maybe you can drive me back home tomorrow.” He has given in. He doesn’t have much choice. Arliss and I wave goodbye as the firefighters pack up their gear and drive the firetruck off to the station, lights dimmed.

It is very quiet in the wee hours of the morning. Frogs can be heard in the sewer ponds; a late night motorcycle whines home from Kingfisher’s, up Table Road and down Scenic toward a house where someone may be waiting with anxious questions, or just as likely an cold empty bachelor cabin that will not be heated until the motorcycle driver rolls out of bed at noon and lights a fire in the wood stove.

 “So all’s well that ends well,” says Shawnda two days later, the hospital opting to do a few more tests which showed nothing but a spasming back. They ever recommended acupuncture. I am meeting her for lunch at her sunny Mill Valley house driving Robert’s car, and will pick him up in a few hours, well before darkness and fog again reclaim the mountain.

 “I’m glad it all worked out and Robert’s not seriously hurt, but you will never live this one down in Kingfisher’s.”

I laugh, because in the day and a half since the “incident in the loft,” as the town wags have taken to calling it, I have learned that Shawnda is right that people will talk and news in small towns moves at the speed of light. But I have also learned that small town gossips can be very forgiving. After all hasn’t this same fire crew made quite a few late night calls around town where even the foggiest streets hold no secrets?       

“It won’t be a problem,” I say, helping myself to another helping of her homemade chili on this cold but bright day in early December.

Sanctuary!

May 21, 1968, I am blithely walking down Newbury Street or one of those streets frequented by Crazy Jane where the rich people shop, when I see an unusual sight. A group of scruffy dressed young people (that is not the unusual part) are playing recorders, beating drums, and falling down on the sidewalk. (That's the unusual part). Street Theater!.

For the past several months, I'd been part of a rag tag theater company who rehearsed in a church basement and we were in the middle of readying a production of Brecht's The House of Bernarda Alba. This was sometime after my disastrous experiment in conjugal living with Rick the actor in Dorchester, where we pretended to be a young married couple. The landlady was so sweet, I hated to abandon her after only a week, when I realized all of Rick's charms were skin deep. ( know this is so unfair. I'm sure he is a truly kind and humanitarian, loving man, but in those days, it was true passion and radical inspiration I was after).

So things at the Theater Company were decidedly frosty. Rick had even left for a few days himself to go back to Florida and see if his former girlfriend wanted to marry him.  She didn't.

I was playing one of the three sisters. I was, you might say, integral to the performance, not because of my stellar acting abilities. A turnip could probably have delivered the lines more convincingly, but because we were a tiny troupe with no one to spare.

But the street theater people intrigued me. so I followed them, as they drummed and fifed and fell down and got up, and finally ended up at a church around the corner. the Arlington Street Church on the corner of Arlington and Boylston Street.

At the top of the stairs two men, flanked by many others. One is in military uniform. Someone has a megaphone and is telling the gathering crowd that they are taking sanctuary in the Church, an ages old custom of providing a safe haven for the persecuted. This was a moment in history.

They are Bill Chase and Robert Talmanson,  Bill a civilian resistor, Tally, as Talmanson was know, AWOL from an unjust war.

The guerrilla theater performers are there in aid of them, of drawing attention to them and their cause. I approach the leader, a woman named Susan. I offer to join their troupe. How can she say no? Volunteers are always welcome, acting talent is optional. I have found the Movement I have been looking for. Direct action, not letter writing, report writing, making phone calls in aid of getting others to go to far off Washington for demonstrations. Right here at home.

And a theater troupe to boot.

Now I must tell Rosemary, the director of our church basement acting group. I can no longer pose as a sister in a Bertolt Brecht play when the real world is beckoning. I am relieved, no more Rick the actor, casting moon eyes at me. But terrified, The wrath of Rosemary is well known. Guilty, as I am leaving them all in the lurch. Can they find a replacement.

As predicted Rosemary is pissed; calls me a prima dona. "But it's for the Movement!" I cry. I am called; I must answer.

She is not impressed. But history is happening on Arlington Street. Surely they can find a stand in for my poor performance, even on short notice. I leave one church basement rehearsal space and head for another church's nave and sanctuary.

Harvard Square - 1967

Let me tell you about Harvard Square, the Harvard Square that was.

The Men of Harvard Square.

First there were the men of that spring and Summer of 1967. I don't remember all of it, the names of all the men. There was David and J.R. There was the guy who sold marijuana to the kids at Holyoke Center; there was the guy I met at the Cinemateque in Boston and we pretended we were in our own private Andy Warhol movie.

There was Vernon. Vernon was a tall man, lanky, maybe he had a beard. He was married to a woman who was bent at the middle; half her body went to the side, as if she had no waist, just a hinge. And not much of a torso between her hips and her head, long hair hanging down. I don't remember her name. I don't remember how I met them.

The funny thing about all these people I met, spent time with, in Harvard Square, in their apartments, on the streets, down by the river, smoking dope down by the river, in the park, the funny thing none of them knew each other. I even went back and asked (via Facebook, how else?) the ones i could find, David and J.R. if they had known each other then. They had not, or if they did, they did not remember either.

David was a bear of a man, who lived in a spacious airy Harvard Square apartment with his mom and Dad.  And his mom was Maggie of Maggie and the Beautiful Machine - an exercise program on public tv. She was gorgeous and fit; she was friends with the likes of the Chambers Brothers, and when they were in town, playing the Club 47, she held before and after parties in the spacious Harvard Square digs.

David's father was an M.I.T. professor; also a big bear of a man.  Maggie did her own thing, and I could not imagine anyone in the circles I had left behind, Methuen, the church, the Greeks, having a mother anything like her.

J.R. was small. His father was said to have been a colleague of Timothy Leary at Harvard working on L.S.D.

None of these men were romantic interests. Except I did have a little thing for Vernon. I told someone in the Vernon crowd that, "I have a thing for Vernon." They said, "Not good. Vernon is in love with his wife."

Ok, that was that for romance.

Besides I was too busy fantasizing about my "beautiful man" of the Coop, he of the mellifluous voice ordering books over the phone.

The buildings of Harvard Square. 

The Coop of course, go in the front door where they sold the clothes with the Harvard insignia on them, and ordinary clothes too, mostly of the preppy variety. Then you could go out the back door across Church Street and re-enter the store there, upstairs to textbooks where Jane and I and Mr. Lister held sway, up through the record department to get there, the escalator, with never ending theme of "A Man and a Woman" playing below and me in my little information box with my phone above.

Holyoke Center, the modern building on Mass Ave. where the kids from the suburbs hung out and bought dope from the guy who sold dope and sometimes snuck behind a pillar to smoke and sometimes asked for "spare change."

Brigham's and Bailey's (which Jane declared had the better sundaes) and of course Dunkin' Donuts.

Elsie's the delicatessen, and the hofbrau where Billy and I took the folk singers, Sandy And Jeannie Darlington, in high school, and some other famous sandwich shop.  Around the corner, Brattle St, with the Brattle Theater which always showed Casablanca or so it seemed, and even now shows Casablanca, downstairs the scented candle shop and everything smelling of scented candles, a warren of little shops and the Casablanca bar and other exotic seeming shops. Design Research with modern designs and, I guess, research, and Merimekko, with their bright simple designs, which Jane always wore. Hers were mostly in a purple or mauve tone.

The Cambridge Adult School where I took creative writing in the evenings and my teacher whose name was Ken thought I was a pretty bad writer, and maybe I was. (I wrote pretty much the same way then that I do now. More about that later.) A pharmacy, and down the street the Old Burying Ground where people have been buried since forever, many Revolutionary soldiers, local luminaries and of course Harvard Presidents.

And the Out of Town Ticket Agency, that used to be in the middle of the street, then they ruined Harvard Square. Then the ticket agency closed.
 

Harvard Yard.

You cannot "Pahk Youh Cah in Hahvahd Yahd."  You have to park in the street and walk. Harvard is everywhere, and it's also a big enclosed area, with administration buildings, classrooms and dorms. A Library, a museum. Harvard Yard.

And then there is Radcliffe.

Scavanging in Louisburg Square

Soon after my short foray into drug dealing, the bathroom ceiling caved in on the Beacon Hill pad, sending Jane and I scratching like fiends down the Hill to Mass General, sure we had contracted crabs from the incident. Assured there were no cooties on us, we had to find a new place to live.  She moved into her own North Beach pad, and just moseyed across the street with a girl called Amy and her roommate Cheryl who needed a third to share a tiny two bedroom apartment.. The way this place worked was two girls shared one room; each getting one single bed. Amy had the former walk in closet in the room.  We all coveted that closet from the day we moved in. Amy signed the lease. It was her apartment and she got the coveted closet room.   

Cheryl soon left for greener pastures, and a lively blond named Rosalie moved in. Rosie and I hit off immediately.  We would get that closet one of these days, and when we did, we'd share it, that is, we knew without saying so, that the closet would become the boyfriend room.

For the time being Rosie slept over at her boyfriend Allen's house more than she did in our apartment.  Jane came over frequently. Amy did not approve, and when she didn't approve and she couldn't move things to her liking just by her mere royal presence (like the termite queen), and believe me, she was no match for the Contessa of Cool that Crazy Jane could be, Amy just went into ther closet and closed the door.  Betty was on the large size herself, and when she plopped in the very middle of the couch in her bright Merimekko print moo moo, Amy oozed away defeated, slamming the closet door behind her.  Betty would smile her sly Betty smile and  we'd plot the evenings activity.

If it was Wednesday, we'd be on the prowl for treasures. Wednesday was trash night, and the rich people on the other side of Beacon Hill, always had the best trash. Antique chairs, in need of upholstery; whole loveseats with a loose leg, dressers that only needed some WD-40.

It was on trash night in Louisburg Square that we met Gilly. Naturally, he and Betty bonded instantly over an armoire the size of a baby elephant.Well, there was going to be hauling that into either of our apartments, so we graciously accepted Gilly's offer of a glass of wine in exchange for helping him get it to his street level flat on the not quite upscale but definitely on the "right" side of Beacon Hill Pinckney Street.

This soon became a routine, until Gilly's apartment was fashionably furnished, Jane had a few lighter pieces in her pad, and various other scavengers we met along the route scored big.  I never mined missing out because I couldn't see dragging anything up the four flights of stairs and  could nver get Rosalie to join in, as she was planning to move out West sometime soon with her beau, and Amy, well, Amy had enough already, so she wasn't invited.

Besides, there was always Gilly's to drop in on. He was gracious to a fault, cut crystal and dim lighting.  Decent wine; anyway it wasn't Annie Green Springs or Boone Farm Apple Wine, which the rest of us drank on those rare occasions we were buying.  Naturally, as was my way in those days, I soon developed a crush on Gilly. It took me awhile to figure out that Gilly wasn't into girls.