“It’s
been 25 years! Oh my god did I say that out loud? My god that makes a body feel
old now doesn’t it?” The redhead I
thought of as Linda still gripped my hand in hers. My head pounded from the
swirl of time. That head pounding ache you get at the back of your eyes, the
kind that explodes in the light. The old
woman had turned away realizing that she was not part of this equation and
began perusing some of the organic vegetables. Math was never a good subject
for me still I tried to do the math. This put me at an even deeper loss.
“Well
you’re looking good.” And she gave me that look. It was a look I was too
familiar with, too close too. It was a look I received from a lot of women,
hungry yet distant as if I was a piece of meat on display in the butcher’s
window. It was a look I have tried to run away from, but yet one that drew me
intimately close.
“...do
you live here? I mean this is the first time we’ve run into each other. This is
just so…” She still held my hand.
I
stared into her eyes those bright blue microscopes, I watched her mouth move as
she put words to voice. I played this slowly through my head trying to make a
connection. I imagined those eyes half closed, the mouth parting slightly
breath coming warm and in deep rasps… and there we were in the back of a bus
as we headed back from a contest of theater. I was two years Linda’s senior and
she had been dating another guy in the troupe, Phil I think his name was Phil
Lee: a cowboy. The only guy in our town who wore a cowboy hat, boots and those
western shirts with the mother of pearl buttons. I had worn a cowboy hat also,
not because of Phil but before I met him -- a black Stetson. I stopped not because
it did not fit in with the social norms of Brookfield, our little suburban
oasis in the middle of yet another Midwest nowhere state, but because my father
would knock it off my head. He would berate me insult me as his father had,
reliving or revisiting a time he only knew too well. But that was all I could
remember of Phil, that and some vision of him bronco riding Linda in some
small wire twin bed holding his hat high over his head...
I
remember Linda had a crush on me, perhaps because I was the lead in the play
perhaps because I had that reputation. Because of timeliness and the necessity
of getting all of us back on the bus and for some reason now lost to me I had
not been able to remove my stage makeup. And there I sat with Linda, together
in the dark of the bus, lit up by the occasional headlight surrounded by
excited voices chattering away about how well we had done, how we had placed,
what our chances were for going on to state… but I was sitting next to Linda.
The little redheaded girl who was trying
to break into the high school drama scene by doing makeup. I think she had done
my own. I knew that she felt both exhilarated and scared to death to be sitting
with me. I was Randy Hirsch, Central’s very own bad boy. I had a reputation
that went on for miles. No girl in her right mind or rather no good
girl in her right mind would want to be alone with me – and yet every girl
wanted to be seen alone with me. It was they way of high school, it
was the way of things yet unuttered. The reputation was unfounded.
Because
of economic necessity I had to work, I worked at the only place an
inexperienced worker could work – in the restaurant business. I had worked my way
up from dishwasher to a line cook at Sabrina’s a fairly decent restaurant
located inside the Marriott hotel. I had
lied about my age and now at the age I could legally work had worked there for
several years. The restaurant business is fairly transient in nature, people
are always coming and going and the life is gypsied in the friendships. The
hotel hired a lot of the college girls to work the floors as this was the
denizen of many a lonesome man. The girls brought in business. Business and
young girls, isn’t that what it is always about?
It
was 1978 disco was at its last hurrah and we were not aware of it yet. After we
closed many of the girls would head downtown to the clubs, the discos and would
dance their nights away or into someone’s arms. Thinking I was one of them
they’d drag me along because having a man around would give them the excuse to
leave if they desired one.
In
the warehouse district of Milwaukee, a place known as the Third Ward, was a club modeled after Warhol’s factory. It
was even called the Factory and it too had several floors for dancing,
partying, with that one floor where you could go only by invitation.
We
used to dance there after work, the girls buying my drinks for the safety of
having an excuse. They didn’t have to as many of the patrons there bought me
rounds. The Factory played to a different clientele, it was place you could
dance all night, way past any legal bar time, the drugs and sex ran rampant on
the dance floor. It was there I developed my reputation. The sad irony was that
I was there to dance, many drinks went wasted, and no drugs touched me. But
that was not what people remembered. Some of the girls I went with had brothers
or sisters I went to school with, acquaintances that would hear about my
dancing with men and women, about my being invited to the upper floor, the
invitation only club. I could go, I would go bringing my dates with me as my
excuse. I was naive, hell I just wanted to dance. It was a reputation I would
never live down.
Often
I would not have time to go home, I would park my little station wagon with the
gold tinted windows and sleep in the back in the school parking lot. Mr.
Wojowicz would every morning about 6:30 come tapping on my window telling me
that I could not park there since ‘I was not a senior and that I would have to
move my car.' He would move on and I would go into school, shower in the locker
room and put on a change of clothes I kept in my locker. This is how
reputations begin. I’ve yet to see how they end.
