The Boys of My Youth (27 page)

There’s a fire going, and some people are roasting things over it. I hear my name being called. “Liz is looking for you,”
Tom tells me. He stands, stretches, and heads for the beer. She
comes tripping up, still in her swimming suit, with a man’s workshirt over it. “Let’s take a walk,” she says. She’s listing
slightly to the right, but other than that, doing okay.

“I can’t stand up,” I tell her. I indicate the grass next to me. “You sit down.”

We watch the other campers for a while, roasting their things, drinking their stuff, laughing and punching each other. “I
can’t stay here if you’re going to sing,” Elizabeth tells me. I stop singing.

Off in the distance the lizardy sound of Mick Jagger starts up, more cars arrive, people shout for no reason. The red lily
has made me feel both weightless and heavy at the same time. The night air is cool against my sunburned arms. I can’t remember
what I did with my shoes. The only thing that would make me happier at this moment is if I could sing
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
, but Liz won’t let me. I try humming it softly but she starts to stand up so I have to cut it out. I wonder where Waldo is.

Renee and her boyfriend Pete emerge out of the darkness. She has my T-shirt and shoes. Even though my arms are balloon strings,
I manage to get the shirt on and slip my swimming suit top off; the shoes I cannot even begin to contend with. Pete is short
and very cool, with bedroom eyes, dark curly hair, and an uncivilized manner. Renee is working on taming him. He likes it
that I took my swimming suit top off even though he didn’t get a glimpse of anything. “Nice tits,” he says generously. We
send him to get beers but right before he leaves he bestows a big, fat birthday kiss on me. I dry my face on my T-shirt.

Here comes Janet, so tan her blond hair looks fake. She’s got a concerned look on her face. Well, there’s bad news. Wally’s
fiancée, Leeann, has just arrived unexpectedly. It was a surprise; she blew in from the north like bad weather, and now my
birthday is wrecked. Everyone groans, including Tom and Pete, who like it when I’m in a good mood.
Bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon her head
. I shrug and put a decent face on it. I can’t think of anything to sing.

At some point during the evening Wally catches my eye. Leeann is standing with her back to me, looking wifely and cruel. He
holds his hands palms-up in the age-old gesture of
Hey, this is not my fault
. I look away with no expression on my face. Tom brings me a roasted marshmallow that burns the roof of my mouth. I lean my
head on his knee and he pats my sunburned shoulder. It’s my nineteenth birthday and here I am, Eleanor Rigby.

“She married him right out from under me,” I say. We’re back to the phone booth. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can
see his long, pipe-cleaner legs, his hazel madman’s eyes. He still remains the legendary good kisser.

She wants to know what made it legendary. I don’t know; it was almost twenty years ago. Probably the fiancée in the background.
“He was nuts,” she says. Yeah, that didn’t hurt either.

All the sweet, absent boys. Smoking jays like they were cigarettes. Playing their air guitars. Doling out their legendary
kisses. We have a moment of long-distance silence for ourselves, perpetually the back-up singers.

“Hey, man,” Elizabeth says, “speak for yourself.”

It’s 1976 or thereabouts. Feminism strikes suddenly, leaving destruction in its path. I’ve always had a tendency to be mean
to men; now there’s a reason for it. I’m learning to keep my hands in my pockets, so they won’t see my fists.

Someone’s living room, floor pillows, chamomile tea, soft-voiced
women in painter’s pants and big hoop earrings. Consciousness-raising. We learned why Susan B. Anthony should get her face
on a coin. We learned that the speculum can be our friend. Some of us learned that the word
orgasm
actually described a real phenomenon.

“Hey,” we said in unison.

I’m here to tell you that sisterhood is a powerful thing. We worked on constructing egos for ourselves; we tried to convince
each other that our lives were worth inhabiting. We stopped shaving our armpits and gave ourselves wash-and-wear hairdos called
shags. Occasionally, one of us would lob a beer can at the head of a deserving male. Feminism. The only down side I can remember
is that the shags were hard to grow out.

The separate-but-equal principle held sway for a brief time. The guys who used to remove our clothes with their sliding glances
dressed us right back up again when they saw our armpits. Women stalked out of the room when men accidentally called them
honey. Eventually, though, we all calmed down a little and attempted to harmonize. Some lean-torsoed men tried to even the
odds by putting on glittery eyeshadow and climbing up on platform heels to play their guitars. With the advent of cocaine,
parties suddenly got livelier and longer.

Across the room, a guy navigates his way through the smoky throng to play with the equalizer. From there he goes to the front
porch, where he adjusts a slide projector. This is his party, apparently. He’s projecting slides of a David Bowie/Iggy Pop
concert on the house across the street. There’s a rivet punched through his ear lobe, a silver star, a small tribute to androgyny.
He’s simultaneously mellow and wired but he speaks thoughtfully and listens carefully. At some point, while one of us is talking,
he presses his hand against the small of my back and doesn’t move it. It stays there for more than a decade.

Some highlights. Early days: long evenings in the country house, I make drawings and smoke cigarettes, drink cups of tea.
He stokes up the blue glass bong, plugs in an electric guitar, and plays “Secret Agent Man” over and over. We populate our
house with dogs and have long, monotonous discussions about how to make them behave better. We go in the bedroom sometimes
and close the door to get away from them, then feel sorry and open it again and let them boil up onto the bed and stick their
noses in our faces. We do a wavery but heartfelt rendition of “Good Night, Irene” as we’re driving, late, back from friends’
houses. On a beach in South Carolina we lie on our backs and stare at the night sky and congratulate ourselves on getting
along so well. Months later we discover grains of sand in the cuffs of his trousers, remember, and give each other secret,
sappy looks.

We’re pretty nice people for the most part, although neither of us ever sands off the edges we started out with. I am prone
to my usual fits of melancholy and self-doubt; he has a tendency toward a manic energy that is enervating for anyone who beholds
it. I have long ago lost all interest in drugs and alcohol but each evening he disappears inside a plume of smoke and emerges
mellowed and distant. Rock and roll, of course, never dies. Sometimes very late at night we sit in the dark living room listening
to the voices of various dead guys — Tommy Bolin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley — while studiously ignoring each other. I observe
that he isn’t fully present past eight o’clock each night, and surprise myself by feeling grateful. I am left free to traipse
around in my own psychic landscape. When we have fights he has a tendency to reply in baby-talk, which causes me to go berserk.
I rant, then I rave, berating him in such florid terms that no one can keep a straight face. We get sheepish, we make up.
The years tick by.

My lifelong addiction to books wanes, leaving me feeling
bored and bereft. Some time later I discover that I’ve left off reading them because I’ve decided to write them instead. He
thinks this is a fine idea and supports it unconditionally, but finds that he is unable to read what I write because drowsiness
overtakes him. I watch him several nights running as he nods and dozes, tries with an enormous effort to focus, and finally
gives up. We agree without much discussion that it isn’t necessary for him to read my writing. His own work is too consuming,
he doesn’t need one more task piled on top of the others. The match stops flaring, the bong stops bubbling, the old familiar
chords of “Secret Agent Man” no longer bounce like tennis balls around the room. The dogs skulk into their corners.

His own work. Political organizing that begins on a power-to-the-people grassroots level and gradually works its way up to
power-to-the-person. He educates the sheep and then becomes the shepherd. It’s a rush to have them all listening, paying attention,
laying down their votes. Another case where reefer has led to the hard stuff.

We’re on the slippery slope now, it’s only a matter of time. It’s women galore. He begins to look at me with an appraising
eye. Familiarity, that good friend of contempt, makes me seem plain as dishwater. Once when we fight over something and apologize
later, he admits that he might have been a bit stern with me. For hours the word hangs in the air above my head like a grand
piano.
Stern
. He might have been stern with me. I realize that one of the reasons he doesn’t want children is that he thinks he already
has one. I start listening to how he talks to others compared to how he talks to me. In a crowded room one night I catch myself
getting ready to take him by the necktie and heave him up against the wall. I feel like a rabid dog, but I smile placidly
and make idle chat with the wife of his best friend, the future chiseler. In the car on the way home I say to him in the most
dangerous tone I can come up with,
“You have
got to treat me like an equal.”
The wiper blades clock back and forth, car lights bear down and then pass. He says, looking straight ahead through the glistening
windshield, simply and sadly, “I can’t.”

An update on the Artful Dodger. Turns out he’s our age and has a day job, besides playing the drums.

“Well, you’ve gotta love a guy in a band,” I say encouragingly.

“I agree,” she says. “I just wish he played the
guitar.”

A woman walks by the phone booth in a nightgown, carrying a coffee cup and a cigarette. It’s early afternoon. I knock on the
glass and wave hello. There are any number of eccentrics around here. She’s a painter.

Here’s a good one: After the divorce I was on my way somewhere early one morning and saw Eric’s brand-new girlfriend walking
from his house to her own, wearing nothing but a pale lavender nightgown and a pair of Birkenstock sandals. Her hair was stuffed
into a rubber band and hung down her back like a horse’s tail, she was holding a sheaf of papers and a long leash, at the
end of which was her dog, a big black biter. The nightgown was one of those Indian-style jobs, with embroidery along the bodice.
It’s the sort of thing you could convince yourself didn’t look
totally
like a nightgown if you only had three blocks to walk and it was too early for anyone to be out driving around. Except I
was. Out driving around. I spent the rest of the morning draped over someone’s couch, sobbing and eating cinnamon toast.

I tell Elizabeth about this. Yeah, yeah, she remembers. Well, never again, I vow. Thank God
that’s
in my past. Who
needs
it. Blah blah blah. The boys of my youth give me the malaise.

“Oh brother,” she says.

Don’t oh brother me. And I gotta go, I’m late for my nap.

The truth is, I’m weary of all that men stuff. It’s either so boring that I’d rather hang around with my girlfriends or it’s
like gunfire to the chest. I actually
like
it inside the bell jar — I don’t have to breathe anyone’s air but my own and I still get a view of the landscape. There’s
a woman here at the colony, Stasia, a filmmaker who went to a workshop to learn how to walk over a bed of hot coals. She tells
me about it postnap, as we’re waiting for the dinner bell, having drinks on the terrace. The thing is, why would anyone want
to walk over a bed of hot coals?

“I saw a flyer for it on a lamppost,” she explains.

They spent an afternoon in the presence of a short charismatic man, talking about their feelings and consulting various higher
powers. At about four-thirty they took their shoes off and performed the miracle. So, what did it feel like?

“It felt like hot coals,” she says.

I knew it would.

The door to the terrace swings open and out walks our friend Frank. Right behind him is a new guy. Frank immediately starts
filling us in on how much work he got done during the day. I feel vaguely guilty about the magnitude of my afternoon nap.
Somehow the quality of the light has changed on the terrace, there’s a dangerous peach glow coming over the horizon. The new
guy is introducing himself to a group of people. There are handshakes around. Today Frank finished a painting and started
two new ones. Stasia says that you don’t burn your feet because the coals are too light. The new guy looks over in this direction.
It’s like when you put your hand in a hot oven; the coals are almost light as air, they’re hot but have very made density
so they don’t burn you. I can feel the frayed edge of his denim jacket and he’s standing all the way over there. I look at
my hand. Frank asks me how the boys of my youth are doing.

“They’re boring,” I say absently. Here he comes.