Forty-nine years ago. Almost Golden, but a decidedly unburnished shade of gold we’ll call gray. Something made me think of this time, on this day when we burn old calendars and the passing of time is on our minds.
I was living that year — 1973/74 – in a studio apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston between where Comm Ave traffic and trolleys bank left and Brighton Ave. begins straight ahead – and I was a block up Comm Ave from the corner of Harvard Street, right along the Brookline line. I was living in one of those bay-windowed, drab rows of amber brick apartment buildings — the last in an unbroken row before the jumble of offices and night spots commences leading up to the corner of Harvard Street.
At some point, I got in my car that afternoon of New Year’s Eve to go somewhere while it was still daylight — I forget where I was going, or why. Comm Ave is wide and double-barrelled at that point, and I somehow, completely sober, turned onto the wrong barrell. A concerned soul coming in the right direction pulled up and blocked me from going any farther, assuming I was one of those folks who’d gotten an early start at the celebration. I wanted to get out and explain to him that I’d immediately realized my mistake and just wanted to travel the twenty feet to where I could turn into the parallel road and u-turn. But I was forced simply to back up and u-turn to get going right. I’m sure the other driver figured I was drunk.
Why am I thinking of this now?
Well I guess because it’s one of many New Year’s Eve’s in my life — there have been far more memorable ones. This one, in fact, was rather drab. I don’t recall how I rang in that particlar new year.
I guess all I recall about that time and place (again, Comm Ave, Boston, 1973 into 74) when I was twenty-seven is how isolating that period felt,I having until around October of ’73 lived “in communion” with three other guys in a house at the quiet far edge of Cambridge on the Belmont line, far from city noise and squalar and danger. Those guys would remain my friends forever. One of them was already my friend prior to that point in my life, and he was the one who invited me to join the house — which was breaking up because one guy was going off to Indiana to graduate school , the other ( his former Harvard undergraduate roommate) to teach law in Miami, the third — I forget where he was going, except into a studio apartment in Cambridge. He lives in Chelsea now. (I’ll send him a greeting. He lost his brother this year.)
My lime green Pinto — my first car — was stolen from out behind theComm Ave building on the following Washington’s Birthday. That civic anniversary helps fix the date of the theft in my mind. It turned up in the D Street Project in South Boston, a notorious nest of criminal white punks. They’d tried to pry open my trunk to see whatever else they could steal. (I wonder where those little pricks are now, on this New Year’s Eve? Old men, dead, reformed ex-cons, unreformed, still incarcerated. They’d broken off the ignition and must have started the car with a screw driver.
The neighborhood was notoriously transient. I managed to make friends with the pretty girl across the hall (I found her name recently in a journal but will not repeat it here). She was a good friend, eager to make a romantic connection, but not with me. We didn’t have a lot in common. I recall playing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for her and she declared it ‘crap music.’ ( Not that that makes her a philistine — Stravinsky is an acquired taste – and the Rite of Spring ain’t a serene classical serenade.) We hung out a little. She had female friends, too. I don’t know, it occurs to me, where she was from originally — probably the Boston area.
I would come to learn that she had been raped while living at her last address not far away. She told me what portions of the terrible story she could bear to repeat.
She was good to me, cooked a spaghetti dinner for me once, invited me over now and then. She had cooped herself up with a very high-strung Irish Setter dog — imagine living with a big dog in a little urban studio! But she was not the only woman in that building who sought security and companionship with large pedigree canines, even though dogs were not allowed. I saw the poor guy who emptied the trash stuggling with the terrible odor of dog waste. I’ll reveal at least that her first name was Susan. She also had a massive security door lock that had a pole extending from the inside of the apartment to the inside of the door to the hallway. It was firmly secured to a plate on the interior hallway floor I don’t have to explain why she would have such a lock.
I’ll stop there. Hadn’t meant to ramble on about this, a gray laser trained on a brief gray moments in a gray time in a gray building in a gray neighborhood.
It’s 2:05, and I see that memory drifting off in a gray mist.
I hope my old neighbor Susan, wherever she is, has found bright colors, safety, freedom, romance, marriage, children, even grandchildren. She’d be in her seventies now. She was working during that period as a legal secretary at a downtown law firm where a fellow secretary told her of an apartment open in her Cambridge building. That was how I found my next apartment — where I was very happy in a neighborhood north of Harvard Square. I would live there from October, 1974 until Labor Day Weekend, 1979 when I hooked up my Dodge Dart (I’d gotten rid of the Pinto) to a UHaul and departed for a life-altaring period of TV employment in Fort Myers, Florida.
So I have to be grateful to this Susan for making that connection for me.
I last saw her when I’d pulled up to an intersection one night coming from my newspaper job’s main office in Dedham. It was at the border of West Roxbury on Route One. She was in the car that pulled up next to me. She was on a date with a guy I knew she was seeing who happened to be a young cop. (She’d wound up getting to know him during the legal aftermath of her very bad experience.) She spotted me and greeted me happily through the open passenger-side window of her date’s car. I was smoking a small Parodi cigar. It was a winter night; I was wearing a winter coat, probably still driving that little Pinto.
“Since when do you smoke cigars?” she asked cheerily, and from all appearances happy to see me.
“Since I got decadent,” I said, that being the only stupid thing I could think to say. (I wish I’d said, ‘since about ten minutes ago.’)
We chatted ever so briefly –seconds — with her cop date looking over from the driver’s seat appearing very friend, though maybe wondering if I were a rival.
Then the light changed, we drove off, and that was it. Gone forever.
Green light. Gray light. Green/Gray memories.
I’m braced for a new year far into my life, far from that time and place.
It’s 2:13 p.m. Sunset is at 5:46 p.m. E.S.T. (I’ll bet they’re already swarming into Times Square.)
I must make it a good year, for me, for everybody I meet.
I must make good memories.
Bright memories.
Goodbye, gray times.
19 Cent Notebook 