!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Bev and Leslie planned another soireé two weeks after the strike. Jeanne wanted to bring Larry, the guy from her high school who’d loaned us his couch the night before the Uni Hall occupation, and his roommate Sam, as a thank-you gesture. We walked over to the Yard to pick them up, show them the way to the Oxford Street house. After crossing Mass Ave, we cut through the Law school, and immediately ran into Howard Lehrman, still sporting a band-aid on his forehead where he’d been cracked by a billy club the morning of the raid.
He didn’t see us, and I hoped to avoid him, but Jeanne called out, “Howard! Hey!”
He squinted our way, then brightened when he saw us. “Jeanne…Sarah Jane! Well, Les told me you were coming to her place tonight. I guess we should go there together, no?”
He still refused to call me by my name, or at least the one I preferred. I had let it go on too long to start correcting him now, but it was irksome. Instead, I said, “Yes, that’s where we’re going. First a little detour, though. Jeanne wants to thank those guys who let us stay in their room that night, take them to Les and Bev’s.”
“I’ve got time. OK if I go with you?”
Larry and Sam were sitting on the steps outside their house, laughing – no, giggling – uncontrollably. As we came up, they tried without success to completely suppress whatever was amusing, ending up snorting through their noses while shaking their shoulders.
Howard was onto them right away. “Are you guys high?”
They looked at each other, and started full-on laughter again. Sam reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag half full of greenish brown leaves and sticks. “Sure. Want some?”
“What? No, put that away!” Howard urged. “Maybe wait until we get inside, if it’s OK with Les and Bev, all right?”
Howard asked, “Where’s that guy, Mike? I thought he came up here every weekend from W. Or have you dumped him finally?”
I had no interest in getting into that with Howard, so I turned to Jeanne and asked, “Did you hear yet about this summer? Did you get that thing at Mass General?” Today, the last Friday in April, she was supposed to learn whether she’d been accepted to work as an aide in one of the psych clinics there.
“No, too many seniors and med students apparently. I’m going to have to go back to St. Louis, work in my dad’s hospital there.”
Larry asked, “Barnes?” Jeanne nodded.
Once inside, Howard cornered Bev, and pointing at Larry and Sam, said, “These guys have some grass. OK if we roll a joint and smoke it here?”
Bev wrinkled her nose. “Hmm. Landlord’s out of town, Ought to be all right.” She flicked her head towards the kitchen. “Go over there, the window by the fire escape. Keep the smell out of here, please?” Then she added, “Let me see it.”
Sam pulled out his baggie. Bev shook her head and twisted her mouth in disgust. “Yuck! It’s half seeds and stems. Looks kind of dead to boot. Sure it’s any good?”
“Well, these guys think so. They haven’t said one thing that makes sense the whole walk over here,” Howard noted.
Bev looked at me, although why she thought I could give an expert opinion was a mystery. She knew I’d never tried marijuana, having as much a fear of losing control that way as I did with alcohol. I put an innocent, surprised face that said, You’re asking me?
With the boys gone, Bev turned to me and asked, “You still knitting that sweater? Any closer to figuring out what to do with your on-again, off-again boy friend?” I pulled the needles, yarn, and half-finished sweater from my satchel in response. She went on, “Didn’t you tell me you thought he had a fling last summer, at that swim club? And he’s going back?”
I reminded her, “That’s not exactly it. I think he had a crush or something on a girl there, but didn’t do anything about it.”
“But didn’t he write a poem to her?”
“Not to her. About her.”
“What’s the difference? If he’s thinking about her, that’s the same thing. Worse, actually, because he can deny anything’s going on, but she’s still taking up space in his head which belongs to you, right?”
Howard sidled up to Bev, holding the smoldering joint gingerly with the nails of his thumb and middle finger. “This stuff is surprisingly fresh, despite its appearance. You really should try it.”
Forgetting her proscription against smoke inside the apartment, Bev shrugged her shoulders, closed her eyes, grabbed the joint, and inhaled deeply, sucking in more air several times without exhaling as she handed it over to me, gesturing with her nose and hand to take it.
I looked at Howard for help. “How does this work? I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”
He made a small “O” with his lips, then instructed, “Hold it right next to your mouth, and make sure you breathe in a lot of air around it, don’t just suck at the end. Then hold your breath as long as you can, let the smoke stay in your lungs.”
Larry and Sam had looked juvenile, silly, when high, but Howard was already in law school, and Bev about to be a senior. To me, they were old enough to be role models. If they hadn’t been harmed by occasional vaporous refreshment, maybe I could handle it, too.
I did as instructed, suppressing a strong urge to cough it all out as soon as the harshness seared the back of my throat. Bec finally let out her breathe, chortling, “All right, Janie!” She reached to take the joint back for another hit. She handed it back to Howard, who returned to the kitchen fire escape window, where Larry and Sam were intent on stacking the plastic wine cups into a three-dimensional pyramid.
She resumed the cross examination. “Let me get this straight: Mike’s thinking about this girl, but you’re OK with it because he’s too scared to do anything about it.”
“Mike’s not like that,” I whined. “He wouldn’t…”
Leslie barged in and asserted, “If he’s thinking about someone else, shouldn’t you be, too? I keep telling you, Janie, after a point, there’s really nothing special about any man. Yeah, sure, you want someone as smart as you, someone who’s not a loser or a psycho. I say, you won’t know what you’ve got, unless you find someone to compare him to. It’s only fair – if he’s thinking about looking around, you should to, right?”
Bev chimed in, “Of course it’s fair. Even if you get back together with him, I say you have to find out what else is possible in a relationship. You’ve already told him you need time, space, right? The next step is yours, not his.”
I felt cornered, double-teamed by these two older friends. I stood still, my neck tight, my hands cupped together at my waist. I found myself saying, “I like being loved by him. I like what we do in bed, what we do to – with – each other. And everything else.” My head was filled with poems, with our walks and the endless observations we shared. I did not know how to put that into words, so I simply said, “I care about what he does and says, not about what he thinks.”