***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night -The Girl With The Brown-Hazed Eyes

From The Pen Of  Frank Jackman   

He desired her from the first minute that he saw her that sunny summer night  on the Cambridge Common in that strange odd-ball year of 1967, the year of his high school graduation summer, the summer of a topsy-turvy world gone mad, gone mad with hubris, fights  breaking out over everything, and nothing. The summer of love in some quarters, all flowers and angel halos, a little of the flow over on Boston Common but mainly in Frisco and points west. But his mind was not focused on such exotic flowery dream-infested things that day, at least not before he met her to hang his desire on and maybe form some cosmic charge with that sweet summer after all.

Back to reality though, the hard reality, the fighting words hard reality of 1967. He had been mulling over this or that thing while walking around the paths of the park nodding, as if in some unspoken solidarity, to the various mainly American Revolutionary War  and Civil War dignitaries holding memorial forth  in that historic space. Strangely his mulling seemed in deep contrast to the heroic  mold of the statues before him since he was trying to order his small wedge-shaped universe to see what it would look like, would look like now that he was coming of draft age. Draft age and  not going to college just yet, and maybe never, since his family had no dough and hadn’t had any for a long time, as least for frills like college, having eked out a working poor existence in one of the low rent North Cambridge tenements and, truth too, his marks in school had not scholarship worthy. So he had to decide whether to enlist in the Army and make the best of it while that bloody war in Vietnam was blazing and blasting everything in sight, turning that whole country to cinders from the look of the nightly news, and the body bags coming back, including a few from the neighborhood, having been all chewed up in some rotten jungle. Maybe if he enlisted he would finally draw a break, maybe he would wind up as a clerk in some German outpost, some NATO frontline waiting out the Russkies with hands on triggers but with no bloody treks through some exploding countryside and death right there at every step.  Hell, he thought maybe he would just wait it out and allow himself to be drafted (quaint way to put cannon fodder) when his number came up. Or maybe just chuck it all and drift to Canada and exile. That last option was against all ingrained family, neighborhood and working -class ethos probabilities but the times were desperate.

But enough of his military options, or lack of options, because this sketch is not about his military problems but about his big eyes, no, that is not exactly right, his big eyes for her big eyes. Yes, that’s better, closer to the nub.  He just flat-out desired her the girl that he would dub –before he met her up close, “the girl with brown hazed-eyes” for even at a distance of one hundred feet or so he could see that she was a rare find- and trouble, trouble with a big T. He didn’t mind a little trouble since the aforementioned military things on his mind was real trouble and so he would play, or try to play this scene out.

It wasn’t that she was beautiful, not in the Norte Americana beautiful all blonde and thin-boned waspy ice cold beautiful that caused him some restless lonely nights with a forsaken sweaty pillow trying to figure some angle to defrost that vision. Nor beautiful either in the boyhood neighborhood red-headed or brunette Irish Catholic frail (girl, okay, frail used in the corner boy hanging night in the neighborhood practically since there was a neighborhood because he had first heard it used by his grandfather who was an original denizen) and loaded up with that frail-hood about a million years’ worth of novenas and rosary beads to etch the fine Irish features into hard desire. No this was something different, something new, something new in the trouble line. Clearly she was from the south, south of the border, probably Mex (which is what she turned out to be), maybe with a mix of a thousand years (he wasn’t exactly sure of that number but it sounded about right) of Spanish conquistador rapes mixed in with ten thousand years of Indian thumps. All brown as a berry (not beachfront hotel tan brown like those Nordic ice queens of his dreams all tanned up at some walking daddy’s expense, father or “uncle” in Saint Tropez or the Bahamas and not red brown tanned like those fair-skinned Irish girls soaking up sun on plebeian beaches filled up with nearby from hunger amusement parks).

Brown down to her nipples is what he thought, Black and long straight hair (straight to envious Nordic girls desperately trying to iron their locks to be fit in hair company fashion around Harvard Square) worn with a becoming single red rose aslant her head. Wearing jeans, tight, and the most colorful blouse, a peasant blouse some girl had told him when he had asked about such things of an old flame the first time he saw one blazing up the Square night, colorful in the way things were colorful in those crazy years, purples, maizes, magentas, off-oranges things like and topped off with big ruby red lips that only highlighted that dark skin. Well those lips did not exactly top thing off because what did were those sparkling laughing black eyes of her. Eyes that would when lit like he observed at that first glance would send many a man before some gallant firing- squad with not a murmur for just one kind look. And hence the focus of his desire.           

So he determined to go up to her, to find out about her, to look for trouble if he could find it was the way he thought about it. As he approached her she gave him a huge smile and so he thought things were looking good. Then straightforward she asked him what he needed, what he wanted, what he desired with those dancing eyes of hers. Eyes that up close he realized were dancing not only because that was their natural state but because she was high, high on something, some drug of choice in that good night. He was sure it wasn’t marijuana (grass, herb, tea, or whatever it is called in your neighborhood) because that tended to had a dulling effect on the eyes (that stoned effect everybody called it) that he knew from his own experience. And it was not some LSD or mescaline because she was far too together for that so maybe coke, morphine, or something else not really widely used in the Norte Americano night, something exotic from down south. He decided not to foul things up by caddishly saying he desired her so he asked what she had in mind.      

And then she, Rosalita when he asked her name although that could have just been a street moniker to avoid hassles since she looked very much like a Rosalita to gringo eyes, laid her trip on him. Seems that she was involved in some student exchange program between her school, her college or some kind of school,  down in Sonora, Sonora, Mexico and Harvard University and while she was here she figured that she would do some “business” for her brother. That business was selling various drugs of choice to the gringos starving for good weed, good sister, and a little morphine for those with more exotic tastes. So what did he want? Hell, he said to himself, she was just a little drug dealer, just like about half the kids in Cambridge these days, and probably more than a few others on the Commons (most of the others there, the ones with the short hair and colorful dress were just gut-busting cops trying to make some easy collars), and so her big smile and those now somewhat dimmer eyes were just good business practices.

He asked her what she was using, and she slyly said a little of this and a little of that. Then he noticed some track marks, made darker by the brownness of her skin, marks that could only mean one thing-heroin, horse, H, boy, bad stuff, bad stuff he remembered from seeing a movie about drug addiction in school, about the hell of cold turkey, about what the ghost of H does to you, stuff that was plentiful down south, but was fringe man with a golden arm Nelson Algren stuff up here. Up Norte. Stuff used by white hipsters hanging around the Square trying to “walk with the king,” they said. They kept on the low but he would see them on his two in the morning jaunts into the Hayes-Bickford constantly rubbing their noses. Or used by low-lifes in downtown Boston, mainly hookers and their cheapjack walking daddies trying to get kicks on Route 66 they said. He asked her about it, about why she was using the stuff but she was non-committal jut saying “different strokes for different folks.” And as she asked him again what he wanted he noticed that those eyes of her were getting muddier, getting more subdued, and he sensed although he did not know this for sure that she would need another fix shortly. He waved her off with a “later” and she went in the other direction to hawk her wares.           

As he walked to Harvard Station grab the bus to head home he thought about those brown-hazed- out eyes, thought about those tracks, and thought that  what she told him about being an exchange student was just so much fluff, was just talk. What he figured to himself was that she was strung out enough to need dough badly for her habit, for her kicks, but not strung out enough to lower herself to doing back alley street tricks like those hookers downtown yet. Then he remembered that thing she said “that different stokes for different folk” thing when she also said that  “hey, the world is tough to deal with, tough for a Mexicana chick to deal with, and so I need a little something to keep the world from breaking my will, something I am in charge of. ” When he smirked a slight smirk of some deep-seeded  disapproval at her (mainly because he felt that he would have seven levels of hell to pay for hanging with a junkie) she said this- “ I can’t go into your world hermano, I have got to be real, and being real takes a lot out of you, okay amigo.”

Yes, he thought the world really does take a big piece out of you, and maybe she was right to shut out the blues anyway she could, find any port she could find to put a break on her sorrows. Then he thought, thought almost out loud as his bus headed into the station that he desired her, desired those brown hazed –out eyes, and he would like some demon junkie seek her out again tomorrow, seek her out in the golden blaze night and take his chances…