By the time I was thirteen, the counterculture had ended ignominiously with the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Vietnam War was wrapping up, taking the righteous peace movement with it, and Watergate had crushed any naive hopes I’d had that politics and integrity were not antonyms. My fantasy of being a hippy artist had died and I’d morphed into a pseudonihilist who hid out among the ’heads. We smoked bales of pot and ate mushrooms to Led Zeppelin and said nothing of consequence. Ours was not a time of ideas. We were engaged in a passionless rebellion whose only goal was purposeless self-immolation.
It was in the doldrums of my senior year that providence intervened: I met the first in a series of older women who’d all come of age during that singular decade—the decade I’d spent learning to match my clothes, hide my Barbie collection, and accept that no one would ever show up at the “groove-ins” I held under the giant maple in our front yard. One by one, these nonconformists would help me revive the kid who’d loved to spread out an old blanket and dance shoeless to shrieking Motown in front of an entire mystified neighborhood. There was Linda, a former modern dancer with a passion for Nam June Paik; Kitty, a bullfighting aficionada whose life was split between waiting tables in New York City and romancing toreadors in Seville; and Susan, a brilliant abstract artist so raw that everything in her path made her either laugh or cry. But the woman who led this procession when she found her way into my stultified seventeen-year-old life was Judy.
The night I met her, Judy was on her way to kill herself. At least that’s what she said—she didn’t seem to have any concrete plan, except maybe to drive off a bridge or something. My best friend, Katie, and I, bored senseless on a November weeknight, had decided to hitchhike the two miles into town to buy a bag. No sooner had our thumbs hit the cool air than a rusty shit-brown Dodge Dart with a peeling vinyl roof screeched to a halt just feet from where we stood. Inside was a pretty, heart-faced woman with a long mane of frizzy auburn hair and the gigantic, frightened eyes of a child.
After revealing her mission to us, Judy asked me to take the wheel—she was far too distraught to drive—and insisted that Katie ride shotgun while she jumped in the back. Maybe she thought this arrangement would hide her mascara-smeared face, but it was far too late for that. In town, Katie and I scored the “grass” (Judy’s word) and we cruised on out to the dirt road that ran alongside the reservoir. With Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me” blasting from the car’s cassette deck, we sat on giant rocks that overlooked the black glass water and smoked and giggled Judy back to life, convincing her that since we’d just met, it was absolutely the wrong time for her to stage her grand exit. When it dawned on us that we were freezing, she suggested we move the party to her place.
Home for Judy was a cozy two-room cottage on a nearby lake that she’d rented for the off-season with her boyfriend, Bob, a sexy moose of a man with size thirteen feet and a mop of crazy black curls. At twenty-three, he was four years younger than Judy, though their difference in maturity seemed greater. Even to my teenage eyes it was obvious that Bob was heroically insecure and hugely threatened by Judy’s and my mutual adoration. This would have killed the immediate crush I had on him if it weren’t for the fact that he had Judy. That she was fucking him kept Bob sexy to me, and since I’d never get to have him, I enjoyed watching him squirm when she snuggled up against me and purred like a kitten. In return, Bob took every opportunity to remind me in passive-aggressive ways that I was the beta dog who’d crossed his piss line and invaded his territory.
Together, Judy and Bob made music, and to my untrained ear it was beautiful. They wrote folksy pop songs, including one that (much to my embarrassment) questioned whether Katie and I would ever become lovers, and they played Beatles covers I’d somehow never heard, like “Hide Your Love Away” and “Rocky Raccoon.” They scraped together food and gas money by gigging at little taverns in the area, making them the first struggling artists I’d ever met. I was starved for anything bohemian, anything that bucked the deadening myopia of our small town, and their lives seemed completely authentic and wildly romantic to me.
Katie and I quickly became Judy and Bob’s number one groupies. We attended every show—stoned, of course—and laughed when Bob wouldn’t let Judy sing any of the songs I requested. He refused to deviate from the crumpled playlist that always dangled from his music stand, unless the request came from Katie or another member of the tiny audience. While Bob kept his black eyes tightly closed as he played guitar, Judy sang as though she were in some nameless pain, her wet eyes staring out over our heads as she searched for the notes and, it seemed, something more.
The extent of the couple’s financial straits became clear just before Christmas, when Katie and I found them eating melted brown sugar for dinner one evening. Horrified, we left and returned with care packages cobbled together from our parents’ pantries and offered to cook them a feast of canned goods. Judy wept at the gesture, while Bob left the room muttering, only to return when the meal was ready. A full belly, several beers, and a few bong hits softened his mood and he agreed to accompany Judy on a song she’d learned specially for me, as a Christmas present. I’d never heard “Candles in the Rain,” the Woodstock-inspired anthem by Melanie (of “Brand New Key” fame) and when Judy sang the words in her plaintive, tremulous voice—“…some came to sing, some came to pray, some came to keep the dark away…”— I understood why she had chosen it as my gift.
Afterward, Judy revealed to Katie and me for the first time that she’d actually attended Woodstock—she had been just a year older than me in ’69—and that she owned a large collection of handmade Christmas ornaments she’d bought there. I decided that she needed a tree to decorate, especially since the upcoming summer would be the festival’s tenth anniversary, and I persuaded Bob and Katie to venture out into the sleeting night with me to find the perfect one.
Dressed in dark winter coats, we stealthily surveyed the yards of the lake community’s larger summer homes for the right-size pine while Bob ranted in a loud whisper about the uneven distribution of wealth. A half hour later, Katie and I fought back yelps as we slipped and slid on the ice, nearly dropping our end of the seven-foot blue spruce Bob had sawed down while we kept lookout. Our theft was justified, I told myself, and therefore not a crime at all; since we were stealing from the rich to give to the poor, it was an act of political protest. I’d be Judy’s new hero, ranked just behind the Chicago Seven.
Later, after the ornaments were all hung and Judy and I were alone—Katie had left to make her curfew and Bob was passed out on the couch—we went out into the yard to see the Christmas tree through the cottage’s picture window. The sleet had turned to a light snow, and the flakes caught the tree’s colored lights as they floated softly by.
“It’s perfect,” Judy said, holding my arm tightly. “You’d never guess that the people who live here are destitute.”
“Things will get better,” I offered weakly. “The gigs will pick up, I’m sure.”
I’d known enough to wait until we were alone to grill her about Woodstock, as it was long before she’d met Bob and I didn’t want an edited version. We wiped the snow off an overturned rowboat down at the water’s edge and sat on its hull, huddling close for warmth. I implored her to tell me about the music, the sharing, the love, and how it felt to trip on acid with thousands of like-minded people. I wanted to know about The Oneness.
Judy explained that 1969 had been a very sad and difficult year for her because her father had committed suicide that February. He’d been an aspiring musician who worked in radio and even had, for a brief time, his own FM show. He was still Judy’s idol. She attended the festival that August despite her father’s death because she knew he would have wanted her to. Many of the songs she heard there made her think of him and she cried a great deal. People held and comforted her, giving her a sense that her dad was there with her, too. He’d had a terrible drinking problem so Judy stayed sober in his honor; plus, she didn’t want to dilute the intense connect
ion she felt. Buying the ornaments was a way to carry the experience with her through the family’s first Christmas without him.
I had no response for what I’d just heard, but I sensed that one wasn’t needed. Judy pulled my head to her shoulder and stroked my hair, all the while looking off toward the tree and its psychedelic decorations. When I looked up at her face I recognized the expression in her eyes; it was the same as when she sang.
“You’re so sensitive,” she said after a while, “and you have tremendous empathy. You’ve got to study acting in college. I know you’ll be good.”
“My parents are paying,” I whispered, “so at this point it’s prelaw.”
“Your heart will dictate” was all she said.
Spring came and Judy and Bob moved away. The following fall I went off to college, where I kept in touch with Judy by letter over the next four years. She dumped Bob in the year after I left but continued writing music on her own; she even recorded a demo tape that she sent off regularly to record executives. Money remained scarce, and she eked out a living by selling freezer plans over the phone. Despite her own struggles, Judy encouraged my creativity in each letter, and I was eventually able to tell her that I’d dropped prelaw in favor of literature and theater. When I came charging out of the closet in my junior year, I wrote to Judy immediately and she responded that she’d always known, that we’d understood each other perfectly the first night we’d met. I wanted to argue the point—was I really that easy to read?—but I realized it was true, and that she wasn’t simply referring to my being gay. Judy had taken a scared, wounded teenage boy and shown him that the 1960s had not passed him by.
SHUTTERSPEED
Bennett Madison
In the summer I am seventeen and naked in James’s bed.
It’s July and two A.M. in his tiny apartment in Dupont Circle and his chin is scratchy against my chest. The room is lit in flickering yellow and the sheets are gathered around our hip bones, the cat walking across our calves.
“Listen, Bennett: I want to take your picture,” he tells me. He reaches up to run his fingers through my hair.
In the summer Anna and I are seventeen in my ’88 Honda Civic.
Velocity Girl is buzzing on the broken speakers, a scratchy tape Anna made for me. Doing 75 on the Beltway and her singing along with her bare feet against the windshield. The windows are rolled down and her hair’s burning white under street lamps and I am thinking she is like maybe some kind of highway mermaid. A dangerous, stranded thing. Take a picture, quick.
On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.
At seventeen, Anna is tall and gangly and blonde and ridiculous, always wearing some insane outfit that involves things like Spandex biker shorts and shower shoes and cheap, ostentatious jewelry. In the best picture I have of her, she’s painted her eyes with liquid eyeliner in elaborate curlicues that stretch to her cheekbones and she’s wearing a pair of dangly plastic earrings shaped like pterodactyls with—I swear to God—little hot dogs hanging from their stupid plastic-dinosaur wings. In the photo, Anna is sitting against a brick wall outside the high school, staring at the camera, dead-on but inscrutable. There is something about Anna that’s locked away; something about her that she herself is afraid of. We’re the same like that.
Anna is beautiful, but she does her best to conceal it. When supermodels talk about how they were ugly ducklings in high school, I never believe them, but if I were to believe them, it would make me think of Anna, whose beauty is awkward and almost repellent, like a wounded bird. Walking through the halls with her, I notice that people keep their distance, and I like it. It feels good to be in the strange dazzle of her shadow.
When we’re seventeen, Anna is kind of like my girlfriend except that mostly we just hang out and watch movies and drive around with no destination. We make up pointless, self-aggrandizing stories together and we convince each other that they’re the truth. But Anna doesn’t know about James or Mike or Sam or any of them. Actually no one knows about them. Sometimes I think I’d like to tell Anna everything, but what’s the point of the truth, when the lie is so satisfying? It seems like it would change things to let her in on the secret.
And sometimes I think I’d like to kiss Anna. But that comes later.
I am in love with her. I mean, really in love. I’m not at all in love with James or Mike or Sam or any of them, even though several of them have claimed, at various points, to be in love with me. It would be nice to love one of them back but they’re all losers and really should be in love with someone who is out of high school. In my opinion.
Being a teenager is supposed to involve certain things. Things like listening to loud, annoying music, lying in your bedroom popping gum, and talking on the phone forever while twirling the cord around your finger; things like learning to smoke cigarettes and drinking your first forty at a bonfire party on the beach on the last night of the school year. Getting wasted, getting high, making out behind the bleachers with the girl you barely know from geometry class. But I’m sort of afraid of cigarettes and I don’t live near the beach. I rarely go to geometry class.
Instead, I am watching myself divide and divide into a series of unmatching pieces. Here is the naif. Here is the schoolboy. The libertine. The prig. The one who does his homework and the one who doesn’t. Here is the grownup and the child. And the something in between. The pieces are suspicious of one another and don’t get along. The one who does his homework is easily bullied into submission.
And certain nights in the summer, minutes after I go to bed, another unnamed version of myself wakes up and crawls out of my body and takes the car downtown. He stands in corners in dark bars where he is probably drinking beer, maybe even smoking cigarettes, and is almost certainly doing who-knows-what with disreputable older men who may or may not be Republicans, or “in finance,” whatever that means. He entertains the idea of falling in love with any or all of them. Eventually he slinks back through my bedroom door and the next morning I wake up with a headache, thinking, A Republican? Or, Was it all a weird dream? Or maybe I don’t remember any of it at all. The next night, repeat. I tell no one.
Here is where it began:
Mike had just dropped out of law school and wanted to be a sportswriter and was the first person I ever kissed. Me a newish fifteen on summer vacation in Chicago. The night I met him, after we had sex, he drove us to the lake, where we sat and looked out over the water. What I remember best from that night is the spiky shock of his stubble there on the rocks and how familiar his arm felt around my shoulders even though it wasn’t hard to figure out that he was too old.
That night, I had my parents’ camera with me. I’d just finished ninth grade and photography class and I took these pictures of the water, the reflections, stuff like that. It’s possible that Mike got a few shots of me—us, even. But early the next day the camera was stolen with the film still in it. My parents never bought another camera. You have to know my family to understand, but this is why there are hardly any photographs of me past fifteen.
A few summers later, I’m seventeen and naked in the apartment of a near-stranger, this guy who wants to take my picture. I’m prickly when I tell him to wait for me to put my clothes on. I roll onto my stomach and he reaches over and rubs my shoulder blade, offended.
“That’s what I meant. Just a picture of you. Nothing to do with sex,” he says. James is twenty-three—a little older, but not too bad, especially considering that he acts like a child. He has lit candles around the room. Don’t think I’m dorky for this, he’d warned me as he’d done it. Now he is dragging his finger along my chin and staring me down. I realize that I hate his haircut.
“I have this thing about pictures,” I tell him. He kisses me.
“The summer is ahead of us,” he mumbles into my ear.
“Pictures are bad luck, kind of.” I kiss him back. “You can’t try to capture it. It fucks things up.”
“I just want to remember how this is. Take a picture, so no m
atter what—you think that’s weird?”
“Kind of,” I answer, standing up and putting on my pants.
Seventeen and buttoning my jeans in a strange boy’s apartment, I am of course thinking of Anna and when I am dressed I flop back on the bed as James snaps a photo of me, then another. Hair messy, half smile, eyes heavy-lidded.
The shutter snaps. And the image is sealed, a splinter of myself that takes off now for its own life. Someday I will wish I had copies of these pictures, to remember what it felt like to exist in this instant. To be this person, in this body. But right now it’s summer, I’m seventeen, and I can feel the thing that was here floating away, frightened by the flash. I never talk to James again.
When we are seventeen, Anna and I put some miles on that car of mine, just driving around the Beltway in circles, headed nowhere in particular. Midnight and the Mormon Temple rising above us on the highway’s oily coast. Going for coffee, going to the diner. Mini-golf, 7-11, video arcade, buy some comics. Just spin the tires, turn that radio up. We like the sad songs best. Shattered harmonies that scratch deep.
One night, we go to the roller rink. When we skate, we have a rare velocity. Anna shows off, mercilessly lapping all the little kids even though they are eight years old and she is six feet in skates. Grabbing my hand, Anna pulls me to the center of the rink. This whole Rockville crowd, these sixth-grade girls with their cutoffs, their waterfall bangs, I just watch them hypnotized as Anna kaleidoscopes around me, feet flying witchy, arms in the air. Casting a spell. Whoomp there it is pulsing and the disco ball, oh yeah, the disco ball. I just stand there. Ridiculous grin.
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