It was the spring after
Kennedy had been shot and only moments before I would turn fourteen.
After wandering around the neighborhood, having visited all the
usual places; the slot car track, the coffee shop, the library, and
the record store across from the library, Charlie and I ran out of
things to do. Uncharacteristically lacking any mischievous ideas, he
invited me to his house. On the surface, this might seem to be
nothing out of the ordinary, but for me this was anything but
ordinary. In the first place, I had never been there before. Beyond
that, Charlie was the only kid I knew that didn't attend Catholic
school. He didn't even have go to Mass and this alone made him an
exotic companion. This, coupled with the fact that I would never
invite anyone to my house. After all, my parents were there and I
had strict rules that nobody was welcome if they weren’t home.
We came in through the back
yard, double jumped up the steps, and broke into the kitchen. It
smelled good and was warm. We followed the music that was floating
in from the living room. Charlie's mom and her boyfriend were
slouched on the couch, veiled in cigarette smoke, slow-eyed from
drinking wine, looking at 3-D slides through a plastic viewer. The
room was a wreckage of tottering stacks of books and magazines,
artifacts of all manner and style, potted plants, record albums,
framed photographs, loose photographs, ink drawings, half burned
candles, thick ones and tall ones, small ones and large, and a
thousand other dusty things, all steeping in a dreamy, cool music I
hadn’t heard before. I'd never experienced anything like this
before, nor seen grown people dawdling on a Saturday afternoon,
drinking wine. I'd never seen so many books outside of a library, or
so much clutter, anywhere, ever. Fascinating things and clutter had no place in
my parents' house. The antiseptic rooms there were spared of
anything beyond the absolutely essential and each stood ready for
another thorough vacuuming and scrubbing. The scant embellishments
at my home were in the form of images of Jesus, his relatives, and
the calendar from our parish church,
The Maternity of Blessed
Virgin Mary. I kid you not.
I barely noticed the
boyfriend, a dark haired, goateed Bohemian; instead transfixed on
Charlie's mother. Charlie’s mother was nothing at all like my mother
or anyone else's mother I knew. She was younger, pretty, and
sensual. Standing at the edge of the living room, uneasily, as if at
the edge of a cliff, a flashback reminded me that I had seen her
before; three or four months earlier at the slot car track. She had
come in looking for Charlie. I remembered it because everyone
stopped racing his car when she walked in. She wore precarious
high-heeled leather boots, a short black leather jacket and a skirt
so tight and short it would have made the cadaverous nuns at school
stop breathing and turn pale. I remembered the moment vividly. The
way she lowered her mirrored sunglasses, movie-star-like, to scan
the store. She held them just an inch away from her face, the
plastic arms hugging her cheekbones as she peered over the top of
the frame. It was a smooth throaty voice behind the carefully
lipsticked mouth that asked. When she left, all of us boys and the
owner of the store silently migrated to the window, magnetically, to
stare as she crossed the street. She jay-walked confidently,
flippantly, across the four lanes of traffic, oblivious that the
oncoming cars had to slow to let her pass. Her gait caused everyone
to hold his breath. "Holy shit, who was that?" someone murmured. No
one knew and we turned back to the business of racing.
Later Charlie showed up and
shrugged apologetically, "That must have been my mom." “Yeah, sure,
Charlie, your Mom.” We all roared and pushed and shoved him and each
other, laughing at his lie. Soon the cars were whizzing; the moment
forgotten.
But now I was staring,
dumbstruck, at the living proof that it really had been his mom.
Thick ink black hair surrounded an elongated oval face of olive
tinted china-doll skin, punctuated by painstakingly mascara'd
eyelashes and painted lips. Tight black pants and a skintight scoop
neck sweater defined her every curve. Cher would soon cultivate this
lithe look, but even Cher didn't know it yet. Some universe was born
and died in the time that passed from the moment my eyes fell on her
and the moment when I finally spoke. “What this music?” I asked,
reddening my neck and ears. She pulled the viewer away from her
eyes, holding it in the same pose as she had held the sunglasses,
and considered me with a sideways look. Her eyes smiled. "Wes
Montgomery," I heard, in her oily-smooth, throaty voice. She took a
drag and exhaled an impressive cloud. "Nice, huh?"
Charlie leaned forward and lit
one of her cigarettes, confirming I had slid into a lair of unholy
indulgence. I’m sure I broke into a sweat when Charlie introduced my
name. She outstretched a slender arm, without leaning forward much,
and delicately grasped my hand. Her fingernails were flawlessly
honed and japaned. Her eyes were as dark as ink. Mine shyly flashed
away. The boyfriend nodded to acknowledge me, most of his gesture in
the easy movement of a thick eyebrow, a slight nod and twinkle of
the eye.
She reloaded the slide holder
and motioned to me with a slight pat on the couch to sit beside her.
"Take a look at this." I sat down slowly, careful not to brush
against her. She shifted to give me a close look. I was barely
breathing. My eyes focused on an intensely saturated image of a
sunset, a photo she had taken along a road somewhere in Florida. The
deep perspective of the silhouetted columns of roadside palms and a
ribbon of pavement, in full three dimensional effect, disappeared
into the horizon, drawing my eyes into an unreal and dazzling
polychrome sky. It may as well have been a photo from Mars or a
powerful drug-induced hallucination. I was mesmerized, suspended in
a throbbing, iridescent Shangri-la, as the smooth jazz seeped into
my ears and pores. I wondered what she would show me next. And I
just knew I would be late getting home.