Lucy
On The Edge Of The World
People, ordinary night owls, strung out on bennie or
cousin coke and counting the hours until day break and sun, hung-over sotted refugees
from the now closed bars and cabarets filled with cheap liquors and quaffed
beers, average sainted vagabond Saint Francis of Assisi dream wanderers of the Harvard Square night, the
shiftless watch out for dark alleys when they stalk the benighted earth, the
toothless homeless, coming into the all-night Hayes-Bickford seeking relief from
their collective woes with a cup of weak-kneed coffee from the giant spouted
tureen all aglow from the cloudburst above trailing off to the chipped paint
ceiling which only those looking to some misbegotten heaven paid attention to did
not bother Lucy (the first name Lucy was all anybody ever found out about her
name as far as he knew) sitting alone at her “reserved” table in the back of
the cafeteria toward the well-abused rest rooms. Lucy Lilac (nicknamed by some
ancient want-to-be fellow bard perhaps but like her surname the genesis
undisclosed to him by the other regular tenants of the night when he asked
around and so he called her by that moniker as well) spent her youthful middle
of the nights just then hunched over a yellow legal notepad filling up its
pages with her writings and occasionally she would speak some tidbit she had
written out loud, not harmful offensive so you prayed for shut ears, a
well-placed handkerchief in mouth, a metaphorical gun like some of the drunks
at a few of the tables, or some homeless wailing banshee cry, but just sing-song
out loud.
Some of it was beautiful, and some of it was, well,
doggerel, about par for the course with
poets and other writers, But all of it, whatever he heard of it, was centered
on her plight in the world as a woman torn, as a woman on the edge, the edge
between two societies, between as one professor that he had asked about it
later stated it, two cultural gradients if that term has any meaning, and maybe
she had been, had been between those two cultural gradients, but let him try to reconstruct what it was all
about, all about for Lucy Lilac night owl.
See he had become so fascinated by where she was going with
her muse in 1962 summer nights, about how she was going to resolve that battle
between “cultural gradients” and about the gist of what she had to say to a
callow world in those days that he turned up many a two in morning weekend to
try to figure her dream out. He had more than a passing interest in this battle
since he was also spooked by those same demons that she spoke of.
[Oh, by the way, Lucy Lilac, was drop-dead beautiful, with
long black iron-pressed straight hair as was the style then after the folk
singer Joan Baez, her sister Mimi and Judy Collins set the pace and the Square
and college air was filled singed hair smells, alabaster white skin whether
from her daylight hours of sleep or by
genetic design was not clear, big red lips, which he did not remember whether
was the style then or not, the bluest eyes of blue, always wearing dangling
earrings and usually wearing some long dress so it was never really possible to
determine her figure or her legs important pieces of knowledge to him, and not
just to him, in those sex-obsessed days,
but he would have said slender and probably nice legs too. Since neither her
beauty, nor the idea of sex, at least pick-up sex, enter into this sketch that
is all that needs to be pointed out. Except this, her beauty, along with that
no-nonsense demeanor, was so apparent that it held him, and others too, off
from anything other than an occasional distant forlorn smile. ]
What Lucy Lilac would speak of, like a lot of the young in
those days, was of her alienation from parents, society, just everything to
keep it simple, but not just that. On that she had kindred spirits in
abundance. She was also alienated from
her race, her white race, her nine to five, go by the rules, we are in charge,
trample on the rest of the world, especially the known black world, like lot of the young, him included, were in those days
as well. Part of it was that you could
not turn open a newspaper or turn on a radio or television without having the
ugly stuff going down South in America (and sometimes stuff in the North too
confronting you headlong). But part of it was an affinity with black culture
(the gradient, okay), mainly through music and a certain style, a certain
swagger in the face of a world filled with hostility. Cool, to use just one
word.
Now this race thing, this white race thing of Lucy’s had
nothing to do, he did not think, at least when she spoke this never came
through, with some kind of guilt by association with the rednecks and crackers
down in places like Alabama and Mississippi goddams. It was more that given the
deal going down in the world, the injustices, the not having had any say in
what was going on, or being asked either made her feel like she was some Negro
in some shack some place. Some mad priestess fellaheena scratching the good
earth to make her mark. And as she expanded her ideas (and began to get a
little be-bop flow as she spoke, a flow that he secretly kept time to), each
night he got a better sense of what she was trying to say. And while they both
were comfortably ensconced in the cozy Cambridge Hayes (well maybe not cozy but
safe anyway) and had some very white skin to not have Mister James Crow worry
about he began to see what she meant.
Yes, those nights he knit a secret and unknown bond with
Lucy Lilac, Lucy who a few months later vanished from the Hayes-Bickford night,
Lucy from the edge of the world, and wherever she wound he knew just what she
meant by the white Negro hipster-dom she was seeking, and that maybe he was too…
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