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.

Patience is a virtue

Mom was full of truisms. Patience is a virtue. All things come to he who waits. All men want (boys) want only one thing.

Never, ever, under any circumstances, even if you are bleeding by the side of the road, get into a car with a boy you don't know. Even one you do know if he's not a cousin.

Patience was not my virtue. Opposites were. Impatience. Standing by the side of the road with my thumb out tempting fate, but that was later. In high school, I seldom got into cars with boys because what self-respecting boy would want a scaggy, thick glasses wearing, dressed like a frump, pimply girl in his car?

Of course there were the disreputable ones, the ones to whom self-respect was a concept they had no concept of.

That's probably why I found myself in the back seat of Cheryl MacIntosh's Volkswagon at Salisbury beach making out with a very drunk Bobby Whittaker.

Bobby was cute, long blonde hair falling into his eyes, many of popular girls even had been known to get into back seats with him. Kissing was the most I would allow on this sultry summer afternoon just blocks off the boardwalk, with Cheryl leaning on the front bumper, such as it was, scarfing down fried clams and french fries out of greasy take away boxes.

We had been smoking. Cigarettes, not reefer. There were some places even I, the shoplifter, the cheating girlfriend, the loose one in the back seat of the car, would not go. Kissing was as far as I would go with Bobby, who was so drunk, he didn't even push for anything more.

After he fell out onto the ground and stumbled off, Cheryl said, with her been-there-done-that air of superiority, "That's the last you'll see of him, you know."

I didn't care. I had the mark of Bobby Whittaker stamped on my face permanently.

I had had a weakness for boys names Bobby before, and there would be many more to come.

Another time, Cheryl and I found ourselves at a party with some more Bobbies, only their names were probably something else They were from out of town, and we all decided to go for a ride in their car, some kind of 1950's rattletrap, big as tank, only made out of tin. not armor plate. We got to our destination, a club a few towns over, and then when it was time to leave, the car sputtered a few blocks down the highway and died completely.

One of the boys found a pay phone and called his mom, who wasn't especially thrilled at being roused at midnight, to come and get us. I had no choice. I had to call my mom, who I knew would be waiting in her chair by the phone, in the dark, no TV to keep her company, no comforting bottle of scotch. Maybe cold black coffee, waiting for the phone call from the hospital or police she knew she'd inevitably get one night.

I was supposed to be out with Cheryl at a girl's pool party; in fact, we had started out the evening at the girl's house, but those kinds of parties always turned coed, even if the parents assured my mom no boys were invited, just girls having a good time, gossiping and swimming and giggling in their new bikinis in the lawn chairs. The parents would be home, don't worry.

She worried. Rightly so in that boys were indeed present, once the parents left the chilling night air for their TV's, Milton Berle, or Ed Sullivan, or Bonanza, depending on the night of the week, and the girls and the paired up.

No dummies, we weren't interested in freezing by the pool either, so we grabbed our sweaters and loafers and paired off with the boys.

Our boys were from Leominster and they knew a cool place there for folk music. Believe me, I was still the most innocent of boy-crazy girls. And the boys were, in fact, perfect gentlemen. Square, college bound, this was as crazy as they got. Perfect for me, at my stage of arrested adolescence; Cheryl found them boring. But the poolside chatter even more so. So we went to the club, heard some wannabe Bob Dylan imitator, and at a decent hour, well before curfew, were headed home.

The sputtering car put an end to thoughts of slipping in under Mom's radar. I had no choice but to call her, since the boys parents weren't coming for several minutes; it was almost midnight; the car had to be towed and the parents would have to then drive these strange girls homes. They were not happy.

My mom was apoplectic, once she realized I was not raped in a ditch. She lost no time telling me, I was saved by a twist of fate this time, but if I ever did this again, not only would my limp body, misused and maybe even with the life crushed out of it, be the outcome, but a sure heart attack would fell my mother in her prime, leaving me motherless, and worse, in charge of raising my baby sister all on my own.

Naturally, car trips with boys were off my social calendar for a long long time.

One more digression. Shame in the pharmacy

It's interesting the way memories work. They say smell is the most evocative and one of the last senses to go. Smells remembered bring up sights remembered, sounds.

When I was six, maybe five, my father and I walked into the local pharmacy to get some mundane item. I held Dad's hand. As we entered the store, the pharmacist looked up and said "Hi there," in an enthusiastic tone of voice. "Hi," answered my Dad, just as enthusiastically.

"I wasn't talking to you," said the pharmacist, a man we had known for years, "I was talking to him," pointing to a man who had come in behind us.

Was there a smell, not that I can recall, but the feeling of deep humiliation, a word I did not even know, came over me at the time, and for years, I cringed ever time that scene played itself out in my mind. Shame, red corpuscles rising to the face, a sense of being less than, unworthy. My instinct was to turn tail and run. Like my puppy Babboo cowering under a chair when pursued by the larger dog Hanson in his puppy class.

Dad, laid low by the words of a pharmacist, not particularly hostile words, but dismissive words, my Dad dismissed and not even important enough to warrant a greeting by a tradesman. More than empathy, a personally felt rebuke to myself, even though I was not addressed.

What happened next I don't recall, but I'm guessing Dad made his purchase and left. Was he suffering the humiliation of his tiny daughter? Was there a history between this man and my dad, that made him not even say, "Oh Hi Bill, I was talking to Joe, there, but good to see you." Would that have made all the difference? Or would the shock of the "mistake" made by my Dad linger anyway, even if they pharmacist recovered his own equilibrium.

Funny, I never felt antipathy toward the pharmacist, just a sense of shame for my dad, myself.

The sense of deeply felt emotions, even ones unnamed and never felt before, are stronger than the strongest smell.