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.