Friday, August 5, 2011

Forgotten Music

In high school.... 1972/73 my friends and I listened to a lot of lesser known music, usually off the wall Rock. But my friend Leslie, and I had some softer tastes. I remember loving a band called the Stories, for example (can't find but one of their songs to save my life now).

Leslie was the one who found the music and shared it with me when we would spend the night at each other's houses.

I was the listener in our friendship.

She was a pretty girl with wavy blond hair and a broken front tooth that enhanced, rather than detracted from her looks that all the guys wanted and usually got. I learned why during our nights together, or one single morning I will never forget when we left my bedroom before daybreak, walked the hill up to our high school, climbed to the roof on garbage cans and watched the sun rise together.... she was physically abused by her father... a man I said, "Hello, Mr. McAllister" to every time I visited their house..

I graduated a half-year early and started college. She apparently hooked up with a ne'er-do-well that had been in our 'hippie' group. I saw her once at a hotel I had worked at in our home town on a visit from Chicago. Her eyes were too bright and her demeanor too distant. It seemed to me the woman who had always been drowning was about to go under for the last time.

Some time later my mother called to say that she had died. The parents were trying to hush it up, but the story was it was AIDS. It was early in the epidemic, especially for Kentucky... but not so much for a pretty girl with a crooked smile who just wanted to be loved in the only way she 'knew'.... if only for an instant.




2 comments:

  1. I thought about this last night when I read it the first time just before going to bed. Now it is last night's morning, I've been up for a while, was awake even earlier, and am waiting for the sun to push back the darkness while I sip from my first coffee…and I'm struck at how familiar and poignant—and ultimately, tragic—your friend Leslie's story is, and in the end, the ultimate waste of a life cut short for such wrong reasons. Not that there's any lack of blame to go around. But that you just have to wonder how little it might have take to turn things around. What is it makes it possible for some of us in the ego and ignorance of youth to simply go on, regardless, while others succumb? Do we survive because of strength or weakness, courage or fear? Is it just some glimmer of direction, a hope beyond the present?

    Whatever…this is a lovely, wonderful piece, sharp and clear, written in Hemingway's "Iceberg Dictum" of the story's real weight and mass remaining nine-tenths under the surface.

    You have fine heart and talent.

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  2. Grizz... thank you for the compliment.

    Being the listener and a born therapist, I did ask questions and listen and offer solutions... even at the age of sixteen.

    What DOES make some of us go on? She was funny and engaging and fatalistic, already at that age. Her younger sister was the princess to their parents and Leslie didn't have a hope in hell of being in their good graces, and she knew it. Maybe, it was not having one adult who loved her truly.... something I did have.

    ..........

    She did leave home (run away seems such a childish term for it) once while we were in high school. I knew where she went and knew she had put a map with a fake path under her bed. One day, there was a knock at our door and it was the FBI. I lied my ass off.

    It didn't occur to me until after writing this and revisiting this memory, how odd that was in 1972 in a tiny town in Kentucky. But, of course the father had sent them out.... in hopes of finding her and keeping the secret. May he rot in hell.

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