My writing class prompt yesterday was Loneliness/Aloneness. What we do in class is use the prompt and let go of whatever shows up as we write for 35 minutes. What is interesting is memory is kind of untrustable. For example, my memory of what happened the night we met the Stones happened is so different in my memory from what I wrote after it happened. It was not until reading it over after all these decades that what really happened came back to me. Knowing this, I have to imagine that my memories of my childhood and teen years are also untrustable! They have been turned into a kind of hard stone, which writing is shattering into pieces.
Loneliness / Aloneness
So Classic. Teenage Loneliness/ middle school. Jeez, in those years, I felt lonely even at parties — also classic. I felt shamefully alone often as I walked the hallways between classes. Just thinking about those years, the sound of lockers smashing shut, indistinguishable voices of teenagers in a cacophony, girls laughing together as they walk by me, chatter, each trying so hard to fit in, so much eye contact avoided, hooded, all of this pushing past me, drawing me deeper into a sense of isolation, knowing I wasn’t fooling myself no matter how much fake I faked! I’d read Catcher in the Rye when young, feeling aligned with Holden Caulfield. I knew his humor, anger, and futility; his loneliness, and his rejection of the phonies. I’m sure the more I judged my peers internally the meaner my vibe, no matter how nice I tried to be. Silently, I was seething at the whole stupid world of middle school — the teachers, 99% of my peer group. And I was not alone. All over the US, the more sensitive kids were getting the picture - and so soon, we would find each other, rise and change everything. The hippie counterculture generation was building underground, like mycelium we were about to bond.
By high school, I was almost full-fledged as a hippie - but not quite yet. First, I’d have to go through feeling alone and unmet for a little longer. To avoid the girls I used to be friends with, I’d get my lunch bag from my locker and take it to the quad where I’d sit on one of the benches around the square with all the other lonely or shy kids or the kids who already figured out how to befriend kids who were more interested in science and less interested in being part of a group or were more apt to like just being with one other person. My best friend, Trina LoPresti, another like me who was turning away from “normal girl world culture”, would meet me in the Quad. I can only imagine we talked about how much we hated school and how much we loved the Stones.
I used to sit with a group of girls in the lunch area that I thought were my friends. Truth is, we all were friends, but a lot of the girls were cousins or had been to the same middle school, a different one than mine. So I was kind of a loner. these girls weren’t popular per se, but they were liked by most of the kids in our class. I liked them. I’d be invited to do homework after school at one or another of their houses. We’d hang out on the weekends and once went on a vacation at one of their parent’s cabins in the desert, with the parents of course. There was a horrible thing that the group did, though. Every few months, one of the group would get picked on. We, because I participated in this cruelty, were like chickens pecking on one until her feathers were bare. But when I was the one they chose to do it to, I couldn’t take their coldness. It was unbearable. Always takes having something happen to us before we realize what we are doing to others. That was when I remember finally ditching school one day and going to a phone booth, crying, and calling my mother to come pick me up. That was a turning point. It was not too many months before I started eating at the Quad and befriending Trina. That was when became a “Freak.” Freaks were the precursors to Flower Children and Flower Children were the precursors of Hippies. Hippies became protestors - and all this is what the counterculture was born out of. This and LSD. You know, Acid. You know, psychedelics. And I’m sure you know the rest.
I make my banishment and rejection from the group sound horribly painful but it was not. Sure, at fourteen/fifteen being an outcast, whether by choice or by the boot is excruciating. One minute, you’re part of the in-crowd, and the next you’re being talked about behind your back, laughed at, and worse of all ignored. There is nothing worse than being ignored except being beaten up, which I never was. I’d pass my old friends, the girls from that old crowd, in the hallways and maybe even stick my neck out and say hi to them, only to be ignored. My face would go hot, my stomach feel sick but I stopped caring after a while and ignored them.
Trina was great to be friends with. She didn’t care about being popular. She didn’t care about the girls I used to be friends with. She was real. She was a rebel. She wasn’t cute, she never tried to be and no way was she going to lower herself to bullshit her way into having people like her. Her parents lived a couple hillsides over from mine in Sherman Oaks. They were arty, had a house full of 1960s art and music. Her dad was cool and her mom looked like a poet. My parents were arty also but different in their artiness. Hers were darker arty, more of a beatnik vibe – my parents were lighter arty. My mother was darker arty but she faked it well to seem lighter arty. My mom wasn’t being her real self in lots of ways. The only way I can put it is she was like as if she were homosexual and had to hide it, pretend all the time in public she wasn’t, which is enough to make a person want to die – so painful. My mother was full of sadness and sensitivity, so unmet in her marriage sexually. She was passionate but unfulfilled. She had terrible migraine headaches before she exploded into orgasmania. –she was about to have a secret lover. She self-defined herself as living her life in black and white before she discovered her orgasms and afterward, she was living life in full color. My father loved opera and was more conservative. How he didn’t know my mom was not fulfilled sexually, I will never know. What I do know is he wouldn’t go to couple therapy and told her she was the “sick” one. My dad was deeply uncomfortable with emotions. He had a wonderful, positive attitude, was beloved by everyone but simply was out of touch with not only what my mother was feeling but what I was feeling and the whole transition taking place around him in the 60s. When my parents finally divorced, my dad started to see the light!
Trina was who I hung out with most. I also had a lesbian friend named Hilda and her best friend named Jerry. All of us or just Hilda and Jerry and me would hitch to Hollywood on weekends where we’d meet up with the river of kids flowing in from all directions to Hollywood Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard, where it was all happening. That’s where we found our “tribe” we used to say. Now, that’s not PC to say - people say our “crew” but truth be told we felt like a tribe of tribes — the counterculture tribe. We were those kids you read about back then pot was $5 a lid and headshops were just starting to appear on Melrose Ave and Andy Warhol movies were being shown in dirty little theaters. And us kids? We were about to explore life on a level that would scare the shit out of the adults in our lives who were landlocked in the 50s and had no idea what we were learning about alternative consciousness. Music was everything, full stop. Music was the doorway to our freedom. Music was teaching us more than school for sure. We were blooming psychonauts, just starting to explore the doors of perception from the outside and soon to walk through them into a whole new way of seeing and living life. We kids would find each other at Ben Franks, the restaurant that stayed open 24 hours, where soon could buy sugar cubes or tabs of acid for practically nothing. Trina and I were swooped up in the excitement of actually hanging out with other kids like us.
Trina looked like a cross between a 1950s beatnik and a 1960s freak. She had long, oily, dark black straight hair and bangs which came down over her eyes like a curtain. She was tall and thin. She was not pretty; she was interesting-looking. Kinda Patti Smith, punkish poetic interesting looking, always dressed in black, only black. We used to walk around school with a fuck you attitude exuding off us with our every we’re-cooler-than-you-move, but we saved the best fuck you under-our-breath sneers for the popular girls, usually blond cheerleader types - clueless. They talked about us behind our backs but we couldn’t give a shit. We were so far away in our minds, hovering above them, the school, the teachers, our parents, the government, pretty much everyone. We were on the Bob Dylan express trajectory, totally into knowing “something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” The other kids, the phonies, were just playing the game they were expected to play, donning the costumes they were supposed to wear, and playing the roles laid out for them. We were doing everything counter to them. In hindsight, I realize now that we didn’t know shit about who these other kids were. We knew they had not awakened yet to what we were into. It was just a time when lines were hard drawn.
While we were still in middle school, I entered a contest on our local radio station for Trina and me to win tickets to the TAMI Show where the Stones would be appearing. It was one of their first appearances in the States. The night of the taping of the TAMI show my dad dropped us off early so we could stand in line for the best seats. We were creaming in our pants over this. It would be the first time we would be in the presence of the real live Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the two we loved the most. The night deserves a longer description but needless to say both Trina and I were determined to get backstage and meet our idols. And we did. I think I’ll just attach the article about what happened. I wrote it right after the show. I put Trina’s name on the article along with mine when I submitted it to Teen Screen Magazine. It ended up getting published, which I guess is the first piece I’ve ever had purchased! Trina and I stayed friend until I transferred from the San Fernando Valley high school we were in to a different one. After that, we kinda went our separate ways. For me, I got involved with different kids and then bonded with my first boyfriend and started hanging with musician friends of his.
Five decades later, I looked Trina up on Facebook, found her in Oregon, and made contact. I was excited to talk with her. We’d lost contact after I transferred to Hollywood High. I couldn’t take the Valley girls one minute longer. Now we were both living in the Pacific Northwest - she in Oregon and me in Washington.
I IM’ed Trina and gave her my phone number. She eventually called me. I remember being so glad to reconnect with her. We spoke for a good ½ hour. She was different than I remembered her and our relationship had suffered in its absence. She asked me if I remembered the accident. What accident, I asked her? Because I did not. She told me she had been driving us somewhere in the old convertible sports car her parents gave her when she turned 16 which I vaguely remembered. I was in the passenger seat, she said. We were driving in Van Nuys near the Catholic School where the carnival happened each year She said another car smashed into us. She said she got hurt in the accident, but I didn’t and she said I ditched her --she said I just ran away and left her injured, sitting on the curb. She said I got scared and just split. I told her I didn’t remember anything about this. I said probably I was afraid we were going to get in trouble, probably we’d been smoking pot. When she told me this story, I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Who was I back then? What kind of person was I? Obviously, I must have been so self-centered to have done that. I told her I was really sorry. Clearly, if I did that I was not in my right mind — but since it had been over 50 years ago, we both didn’t know what else to say. It’s hard to believe that was me and I did that. After that our conversation seemed a bit flat and we ended up hanging up saying we’d talk again sometime. Actually, I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk with her again or to remember that side of me. I had betrayed her back then. And, I had a life to live in the here and now. And the lessons I have learned over my lifetime have made me a better person. But, still, we did have a fuck-load of fun back then and hopefully, we do meet up as old women someday when I go down to Portland. Who knows
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Wonderful read! Enjoyed it .
Great story! Just read it aloud with my daughter over dinner! Xoxo