Playing House with Two Boys in 1967

Three

I can’t believe I’m living in this house with Louis. We made out at a friend’s birthday party only a few weeks ago and now we’re sleeping together every night in a grownup queen-sized bed.

I take a loaf of Wonder bread out of the breadbox as Louis pads in on white, athletic socks. We have the place to ourselves for at least ten days and it feels like we’ve been here forever. I’m excited all the time. There’s not much bread left. We’ll have to do an A&P run and get more and maybe some whitefish salad and coleslaw.

Gary is sitting at the vinyl upholstered dinette in the corner of the kitchen smoking a Lucky, head-deep in a book. Louis and I are the mom and dad. Gary is like our child.

Louis opens the refrigerator and retrieves a jar of golden-brown spicy mustard and hands it to me. I pull out a butter knife from the drawer and carry our bounty to the table. I lay out the bread in a wordless ritual. I’m generous with the mustard. It’s my own recipe. .

From a back bedroom, Country Joe and the Fish croon. I feel dreamy and content. “Tonight is The Fugitive,” I say. Louis squeezes my hand. “Ten o’clock” Gary says. “Two more episodes!”

Louis looks over at Gary. “I think I’m going to drop acid for the final episode.” I let go of his hand and stand up. We were finished with our mustard sandwiches. They go down quickly.

“I want to read you something” Gary says. We head into one of the bedrooms and sit cross-legged on the bed. Gary picks up his tattered paperback of Harlan Ellison stories and begins to read his favorite story. “Repent harlequin said the tick tock man.” Gary’s voice scares me a bit.

I’m watching and listening, but very aware of my position on the bed. Do I look good? Louis is stretched out near me. I want them to think I am smart, that I get it, that I get why this science fiction story is everything and why Harlan Ellison is a genius. I’m not sure I fully understand the story, but I know they like it because the harlequin is a revolutionary.

Gary reaches the part where jellybeans are raining down onto the crowd below. It’s an anarchic act meant to fight the tyranny of time and it’s just about the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like I’m in the middle of an animated dream. His voice is getting faster.

Is Louis looking at me? Is my hair falling right? Louis is leaving for Goddard College in a few weeks. I feel like we’re trying to stop time for a bit. Gary and I are dreading it, but I can’t show it. My most important job as a teenage girl is to be cool.

I’m not that comfortable on the bed. I shift and lean back against Louis’ skinny body for support. The Country Joe album ends and although we can hear the sound of the stuck tone arm gently riding the last groove on the vinyl, none of us move.

I met Louis when I was 16 years old. He was my first love. He was a skinny, gentle kid with thick glasses. Even then he was known to be a deep thinker and passionate about social justice. In August 1967, we would spend ten days together that neither of us would ever forget. Our friend Gary was there too, always taking photographs. I still have them.

Since learning of Gary’s death, I had immersed myself in photographs and memories of those ten days. I imagined myself back there and tried to sort out what I could like whose house were we at? Our friend Marshall lived just a few blocks away. Was it his house? His father was living elsewhere with a new wife and Marshall had the house to himself, but Louis had always insisted that we were at Gary’s.

Marshall: No way! No way! The photographs you have of you with your head in Louis’ lap, that was my backyard! There was the shed.

Well, that’s Marshall. We met up in New York recently and talked over omelettes near Grand Central Station and I had the recorder running.

M: It doesn’t make any sense. You went into the den where the TV was and watched whatever that show was.

BK: The Fugitive.

M: I can’t remember what it was, but it was something that you wanted to watch on TV. You were there! You guys were there! You stayed in my mother and fathers’ bed.

BK: Wherever we were, Gary’s, Marshall’s, we made it our house and lived like a little family.

Eben: You know I never asked what the quality of those ten days were. Were they heaven on earth? A mixture of hell on earth?

That’s Eben. I knew him back then as a sweet 15 year-old-boy with blond hair and glasses, now a therapist and musician. We spoke by phone after he responded to my Facebook posts of Gary’s pictures of Louis and me from our ten days in Newark.

E: It sounds idyllic.

BK: It was idyllic. I remember Gary being very focused on both of us. It was as if we were creating some kind of a new family. It was very safe, and it was very beautiful.

E: I think you really hit on something there. I think you’re absolutely right; for Gary, his friends were his family, and this was like an extension of it or a development of it. It would have been so meaningful to him. I think that’s why, when people went away, for him –

BK: It was the worst.

E: Yes, I don’t think I would have said that it was abandonment, but I think he experienced it as that. I think you’re right on the money with the analogy to family.

BK: Do you think that Louis was finding another family too?

E: No, maybe. I think Louis had really a much more intact, together sense of self and psychology. I think Louie was generally a pretty solid individual. I grew up with Louie, but we were never necessarily that close. We were neighbors. He lived across the street from the school. I would see him. He had a bound to him. Do you remember that; his long-legged gait?

BK: Yes.

E: The first step was almost a leap like let’s get into it. Let’s go! He’s another guy that I have very sweet feelings about. He was never rough or insulting or someone hard to deal with. I never felt anything negative about him.

Louis once told me that we didn’t like each other when we first met. In fact, it was when Tom Hayden had come to Newark to organize the first SDS chapter. I don’t remember much about Louis from that meeting. What did stick in my mind is Tom Hayden sitting on the floor and seeing the holes in his socks. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t.

According to Louis, we met again at a party and that’s when something more momentous happened between us. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I called on Eben’s extraordinary memory to fill in the missing details. I didn’t remember that he was there.

E: Well, all I can tell you about that evening is, as good as my memory is, I can’t tell you how I got there. It must have been Marshall or Louis or somebody who said, “We’re going over to Steve’s. His parents won’t be there … birthday.” I wound up there and Louie was there, and Marshall was there, and you were there. I don’t think I knew you. I don’t remember coming with you or who brought you.

But what I do remember is that, at some point, you were upstairs, and the guys were talking about who was going to be going up to – I don’t know, fulfill some mandate, a manly mandate that apparently you were on board with. Now, I wasn’t on that list, which is a good thing because I would have jumped through a window and kept running.

BK: Why? You would have been scared?

E: Oh, absolutely, yes. I think I was 15 going on eight at that point. If I can remember, and I think I do remember this well, Louie was wearing his traditional – everybody had a garb. Marshall had the work boots and they weren’t dungarees, but heavy pants that had a thick cuff that bunched up around those yellow/orange boots.

BK: White t-shirt.

E: Do you remember those work boots?

BK: I do now.

E: I had to go out and get a pair based on loving them so much because Marshall wore them. Louie was wearing his denim blue shirt and his slightly darker dungarees, thin as can be with a mow type-haircut, his black hair coming over. At some point, I don’t know what happened, Louie was the one who ascended the stairs.

BK: The one that I chose. Let’s just insert here that I don’t have any memory of this, but I’m assuming, you know, you put things together. Louis has more of your memory. He remembers, but I don’t recall going up to a bedroom and summoning Louis to be with me.

I didn’t want to believe that I was this confident little New Jersey Lolita. It seemed like some other girl was being described. I hid my shock and embarrassment with frequent laughter while Eben told me the story.

On top of all this, I found out later that Louis had dropped acid that night.

E: At that point, I know I wasn’t doing any kind of substance other than maybe chunky peanut butter. Louie came bounding down, his hair mussed, that “Moe” haircut (3 Stooges) was all over the place. His shirttail was out a bit and he was smiling like “mission accomplished.” I might have misinterpreted what all that meant, but I believe he achieved manhood.

BK: (chuckles) I’m so sorry to be laughing.

E: No, no. Again, maybe these are just my projections.

BK: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so because when I’ve spoken to Louis in the past, he has referenced that. It’s just that I don’t remember the selection, but I know it happened. I don’t remember it being that way like who got to go upstairs and be in the bed with me.

What I certainly know is that there was some kind of making out, if you will, and there was something achieved, but not of the magnitude that he might have hoped. What’s funny is that you said that Louis then came down the stairs triumphant as if he had scored and that I know isn’t true. I’m not saying it isn’t true that he did that. You’ve got a brilliant memory about these things, better than any of us so far, but what I’m saying is, there was nothing to celebrate, not very much. Not very much.

E: Well apologize to Louie if I’m off on this, but the impression that he gave or wanted to give or maybe later gave was that it was more.

BK: Wow. I don’t think you need to issue any apologies. He is so aware.

E: I would have done the same thing!

BK: Well, of course!

I jokingly dubbed Eben my “Memory Man.” He had such a keen recollection of Newark families and street names and stores and teachers. I hadn’t known Eben all that well when we were young. I was getting to know him now. The same group had been important to us both and that group was shrinking. It was the news of Gary’s recent death that had brought us together.

E: It’s somewhat frustrating. Gary passed away only months ago and had you had the opportunity to have his input, it would have been illuminating, but it’s gone.

In the following days, Adele’s song “Hello” blew up. All I heard in my car and stores was “Hello. It’s me. I was wondering if after all these years, you’d like to meet to go over everything. I’m dreaming about who we used to be when we were younger and free.”

More and more comments began to appear under the photo of Louis and me on my Facebook page. Several expressed a similar sentiment; “You have to write this story!” “Tell me more!” that kind of thing. This interest urged me to continue with the story, but I realized I was already in the middle of writing.

Eben had given me some other names of people from Newark and I had set up more phone interviews.

I had begun researching Newark from my years at Weequahic High School and the civil unrest of 1967 which had been just one month prior to my August visit and those ten days. That seemed to stand for a whole world of youthful longing and hope and loss, a sealed sanctuary where my past and even my younger self could be captured and preserved.

One night, I was putting away some things in the basement and I found a small box marked “jewelry and repairs.” Inside were broken pieces, necklace parts and earrings and charms. I pulled out a small circle that looked familiar. It had a peace sign inside simulating the look of stained glass, ringed in gold, but not real gold. I remembered wearing it as a teenager on a very long chain thinking it looked cool that way.

I brought the charm upstairs and looked for another long chain thinking maybe this could be my talisman while I continued going into the past. I found a chain curled up, unused in the back of my jewelry drawer and attached the peace charm to it. I slipped it over my head.

There are three more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk

Coming next in Episode Four of Ten Days in Newark - what did we all listen to? What about concerts? Getting out the guitar….

You can read and hear Episode One, in which an unexpected letter sends me into my 16 year old self and my first love….and Episode Two, in which I learn about real life in the Weatherman collective from Marshall. All episodes have both audio and text, and audio has extra bits!