"Restless Farewell" (in four parts)

"I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life."

Jack Kerouac


I.
"O Mother, Mother, go make my bed
Make it both long an' narrow
Sweet William died for pure, pure love
An' I will die of sorrow"

Bonny Barbara Allen
Child Ballad 84A, Francis James Child (1825-1896)

In high school I had several remarkable girlfriends. Three of them were Eleanor, Carla and Franja. Eleanor played guitar and we spent lots of evenings singing Child Ballads, and other folk songs. We dreamt about North Beach in San Francisco and the beat poets. Once, before we were old enough to drive, we made a pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore where we loaded up on beat poetry, read Kerouac and fell in love with Gary Snyder.

My memories of that day are a series of random images leading to more than a few mysteries. How did we get there? Did we take a bus? My most vivid image is of the three of us walking single file through a tunnel near the Presidio with cars whizzing by. In that image, I am (oddly) carrying an old Thonet Bentwood chair that I bought for $1.50. To this day bentwood chairs symbolize my version of Bohemia; a place where an intelligentsia of artists and writers warm their chilly fingers on steaming mugs of black coffee and their minds on steamier discourse.

We came from middle class neighborhoods but we weren’t quite cheerleader material. As often as we could we dressed like beatniks and drank coffee out of thick diner mugs. We were passionate about poetry and painting and the basement Art Department and English Class were our domain. Those were the days and nights of a fleeting innocence, before North Beach became home to topless bars and tourists and a new era exploded across town in the Haight Ashbury; before Dylan rocked our world with his blazing images and by going electric at Newport.

The story that I want to tell about my friend Billy was before that time, in the innocent time before "the Haight" and before we were old enough to taste the sadness and loss that came farther down the road.


II.
"Has anybody here,
Seen my old friend John
Can you tell me, where he's gone?
He freed a lotta people,
But it seems the good die young,
I just looked around,
And he's gone,"

Abraham, Martin and John
Words and Music by Dick Holler 1968

I was 16 the year my family and I moved to the neighborhood. I started high school in Georgia where I was born and finished my freshman year in California. I was in culture shock. Most of the California kids in 1961 had never seen a real, live southern girl. It was the onset of the Civil Rights movement and I was an outsider.

In one of my classes there was a big blond boy named Lee who made conversation with me just to listen the way I talked. I was shy and embarrassed by the attention, but Lee was a kind boy. His girlfriend went to another high school and she was a cheerleader. Her best friend was dating Lee’s best friend and they were something of a foursome. Both girls were older, wilder and flashier than any girls I knew. I don’t remember how or when I met Lee’s best friend because in all of my memories, it seems I’d always known him. He called Lee "Butch" and his name was Billy.

Butch and Billy were surfers. They wore navy peacoats all buttoned up against the Pacific cold and had bleached blond hair. In our sophomore year, we read Melville in English Class and were assigned class projects. Billy wrote an imaginative script based on Moby Dick and added a score of surf tunes and sea chanties. The boys performed it on tape in the style of an old radio show. It began with the sound and fury of a stormy sea, creaking in the square rigging and a deep somber voice intoning the words, "Call me Fishmeal". The words are followed by a ponderous silence to which memory I’ve added the faint rustle of Melville turning in his grave.

Back then at our school, each class sponsored an assembly of students, a kind of a talent show that one class performed for the rest of the school. In our junior year, Eleanor, Franja and I sang. Our stage set was a darkened coffeehouse. We girls wore black and were barefoot. Billy and Lee and a few like-minded friends sat around onstage and provided atmosphere. In our enthusiasm to create an authentic underground look, we had painted bricks on the back wall of the auditorium. An uneasy administration threatened punishment, but we were all "good" students. It was heady stuff for 1962.

Afterward, a few of us went over the mountains that separated our town from the ocean in the back of Lee’s brother’s truck. On the ride home Billy huddled for warmth with Eleanor, the beauty of our group, under an army blanket. I felt both envy and admiration. The taste of freedom on the salty wind was wonderful. In this new world I was finding my pack.

Pack is always important at that age, but never more so than for us. Our generation would be informed by a cold violence that none of us could foresee. Less than a year later, as we sat in class, a faltering voice came on the school intercom and told us that our president had been shot. "I repeat, John F. Kennedy, jr. has been shot and has been taken to a hospital in Dallas, Texas." At the time, I was gazing out the classroom window at a clearing in the trees on a mountainside above town; my eyes filled with tears but, for many long moments, they never left that green meadow.

III.
"Teen Angel, can you hear me?
Teen Angel, can you see me?
Are you somewhere up above?
And am I still your own true love?"

Teen Angel
Words and Music by Jean Surrey & Red Surrey © 1959

Billy and I lived in the same part of town. Between my house and his was an orchard through which ran the Billy Jones Railroad. It was a miniature train whose engineer (Billy Jones himself) gave rides on Sunday to the neighborhood kids. I can’t remember our friendship forming in any linear fashion, but I have soft memories of being in the Craddock home.

His mother was a bustling presence in the kitchen and his father, a quiet one that looked at the world through the same gray eyes that his son did. Billy always herded me past his doting mom in the manner of teenage boys, so she would not embarrass him with some proud story from his babyhood. I was usually there on Sunday afternoon, still dressed in my church clothes. My mother made my dresses in those days of lace collars and skirts that were getting shorter. I was forever hiking my slip up so it wouldn’t show.

In my friend’s small room in the back of their house, he had a framed 8 x 10 photo of his sister. She was a gorgeous girl with platinum hair teased and sprayed into the style of the day. With my straight brown hair and plain looks, I was an oddity to those nice folks, but not an outsider. In my mind I was on the path to Bohemia. I loved those Sunday afternoons when I would sit cross-legged on his bed and we would talk for hours.

He was the first boy who ever asked what I thought and believed and even got me to think about those things. He considered me to have had an "underprivileged southern upbringing" because I’d never read a comic book and was sadly out of touch with the finer points of California Teen culture. He made fun of me relentlessly about almost everything and he took it upon himself to educate me. He played "Teen Angel" and "The Leader of the Pack" over and over. He wanted to make sure that I understood the pathos and drama of the teenage plight implicit in their lyrics.

He made everything that interested him compelling because he knew so much. I tried hard to amaze him with some arcane body of knowledge of my own. I went to great lengths to make him smile and lose for an instant some of that James Dean cool that he affected. My best effort was that I could recite (from memory) the lengthy poem, "Go Down Death" by James Weldon Johnson as well as the names of all the books of the Old Testament. I hadn’t come into my sexuality yet and he teased me about that as well as about my lack of style. It became increasingly clear to me that I would remain a virgin for the rest of my life.

We both were already good at hiding our shyness but we fell so easily into being friends that I can’t recall the falling. As the years went by I would give my heart to someone else but, except for the girls I loved, he was my first friend.


IV.
"He wore black denim trousers
And motorcycle boots
And a black leather jacket
With an eagle on the back
He had a hopped up cicle
That took off like a gun
That fool was the terror of Hwy.101"

Black Denim Trousers
Words and Music by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller ©1955

The defining moment of any teenager’s life is the time he or she learns to drive and acquires a vehicle. As ordinary as a change of season, the surfboard faded in importance, as the motorcycle became central to Billy’s life.

Though we were schoolmates and neighbors, Billy and I didn’t see one another very often. I think our affinity was in the way we thought of ourselves as different. Some of us would later identify as "counter-culture" but in those days, we didn’t think of ourselves as part of a greater whole and our feelings had not yet been analyzed and politicized. Along with an adolescent newness of things, we felt an uneasiness that would later translate into something more ominous. There was poignancy to those days—a kind of childhood’s end--which seemed all the sweeter for its portent.

We loved each other’s edges and the way they fit together to form different patterns. Perhaps there was an unconscious knowing that we were destined to lose those edges, to lose pieces of each other and we admired each other the more for it. We would be tossed and tumbled by a tumultuous sea of time for which we were ill prepared; like children, we abandoned ourselves to the moment.

One of those moments took place on the street in front of the Craddock’s house. I don’t remember how old we were but we were old enough that the neighborhood kids who watched Billy work on his new motorcycle, looked up to us. It wasn’t his first bike, but it was the first "big" one. It was from Sam Arena’s down on First Street in San Jose. Sam was the Harley dealer in those days when that world was populated mostly by a motley, marginalized bunch known as "outlaw bikers". Sam’s operation was in a huge old garage with red brick walls and the smell of wooden floors permeated by motor oil.

In my mind’s eye, it was a summer evening, not long before dark. I had to get home soon and I had stopped by to see what Billy was doing. The bike was in the driveway and he was working to get it street legal. He fired up the behemoth and rode up and down the bumpy street once or twice--navigating turns, stopping for adjustments. I watched as Bill drove up and back solo for my benefit. Getting steadier, he rode by slowly and attempted to stand on the seat with hands in the air…no, that didn’t work too well, more practice needed. "How about if I stand on the seat and you steer?" The memory of our "trick riding" is a faded one, but I can still feel my bare feet on that broad leather saddle, arms outstretched for balance, knees braced against Billy’s T-shirt clad back. My hair whips around my face as I take a bow to our imaginary audience. It is a clear and precious image. I like to remember us that way with our beginnings in innocence.

Our early adulthood led to the expected things: marriages, the shop in town operated by me and my husband, and the small house in the woods where Billy and Carole lived, his first published book. We experienced hope and creativity and love. But it also led to an unexpected place of confusion and alienation. Our formative years were shadowed by a series of assassinations and a war that some of us fought and some of us didn’t—and none of us understood; by the use of chemicals that changed the way we looked at the world. Families were divided. We struggled with self-inflicted wounds of divorce and betrayal, overdose and suicide, addiction and pathologies not yet named. However, those are other stories.

An essential part of our growing into adulthood would involve forgiveness, both of self and of others, and acceptance and healing. For me, there is no question that we live on in each other and give each other life. Truly, a man or a woman can die and give us not only life, but also that "great consciousness of life".

Michael Edwards Dorenzo, March 2004
For WJC, (July 16, 1946 - March 16, 2004)