Ms. April of 1969

Sometimes you can look back to where you began and see that place clearly for the first time. It’s all about how there is never any break in our continuity but only denial, only a current sense of who we are based on forgetting who we have been. This amnesia makes the world feel thin and threadbare. We are like actors who don’t dare get too method for fear of remembering too much and realizing that we are wearing a mask offstage as well as on and can’t remember who we were to begin with, who it was that decided to go on stage and try to make the crowd feel they were seeing someone special and important up there.

I have wanted to write, to write something that would make the kind of reader who matters love me, for as long as I have wanted to be anywhere but where I was and anyone but whom I was. What does someone who lived that desire for many years write about? What story provides a real and true account of such a life once the running away stops? How does someone who thought he was Napoleon for thirty years just to avoid being who he was tell the story of his life? Is Napoleon important to the story?

I still want to be loved but I don’t want to lose or deny my past anymore. I’m more afraid I can’t get it back and because I can’t get it back that life will never seem real to me because I will never seem real to myself.  That past is all I am and all I can get into the words I write trying to make them matter, trying to make them more than empty chatter about nothing at all. It would be easier if I’d spent thirty years thinking I was Napoleon. I spent thirty years thinking I was a writer and, even now, feel the need to tell my story to anyone who will listen.

I remember wanting to be gone when I was living in the small Alabama town where I was born and being afraid that I would never escape the web of life into which I was born. Now I have, or at least it feels that way, and I long for roots that go back deep and far. I think Hugh Hefner may have helped ruin me. Every Sunday, my mom and I would go to visit my grandparents. My grandfather had a subscription to “Playboy” magazine that his sister gave him for Christmas every year. I would often disappear on those Sunday afternoons up into an upstairs bedroom to read my grandfather’s “Playboy” while real life, the life that I was legitimately part of, went on downstairs.

Where is the boundary between fantasy and reality? What was the reality of those Sunday afternoons long ago? Was Ms. April of 1969 a part of my life? I can see her after all this time still smiling out from a page that was a window I thought I had to turn into a door somehow to keep my life from being wasted.

There was John Cheever and Saul Bellow also, but it was Ms. April that was the center of the structure. I wanted to be John Cheever so that Ms. April would read my story and know that I was special enough to walk through that door and be a part of the real world, the world I saw with my redneck nose pressed against the glass of that window dreaming and afraid I would always be on the wrong side of the looking glass, cast out, cast down and in the middle of nowhere with no way to earn a ticket to anyplace that mattered, anyplace I could matter.

Did the half-blind redneck kid, the one that started wearing glasses at four and did not drive until about thirty, matter? Did he matter and just not know it? Did he matter more or less because he wanted Ms. April of 1969 with such an awful, sincere and turnip-witted passion? Was that turnip witted passion what made him real or what kept him from being real? Did Ms. April of 1969 make him who he was or keep him from being who he might have been, who he could have been really and truly right then and there?

I guess “Playboy” is where the idea came from that one measure of the quality of a man’s life was the length of the list of women he had made love to in that life. I was afraid at that time that my list would never be long enough. Now it seems very long and very sad. It feels like a list of failures, like a list of parts of myself, some of them small and some of them larger, that I’ve lost and can’t get back. I remember telling Jane that I wanted to die in her arms. I remember telling her about all the names on the list and how much I wanted her name to be the last, how wonderful it seemed to me that I had found the person I was going to grow old with and how wonderful it felt to know that awful list of failure and loss was not going to get any longer.

Please don’t ever become just one more name on that long and awful list. Please let’s do whatever we need to do to make this real, to make it last and never be just one more life that was lived for a while and then slipped away into nothing but memory and regret. That’s what I said to her at least as many times as I said “I love you” or “Jane please stop”. Every time I said “Jane please stop”, I was begging her not to make me go away again, not to make me go away again and add one more name to that awful haunting list of lovers who were “no longer with me”.

The list will stop haunting me when I add the last name. The list will change then into a scrapbook full of a life more wonderful than any that redneck kid could ever have believed he would live. “No man knows my history” said the prophet Smith, “I would not believe it myself if I had not lived it”. I could say the same. Smith spoke to angels. Did Smith speak to angels? Is there an angel somewhere to turn my list of failures into a scrapbook two people might look through together? Maybe she has a scrape book too and we can put the two together to make one story for the both of us, one story about a long strange journey that finally brought us both home again to where we belonged.

  

I still wonder sometimes where Ms. April of 1969 is today. She would be old now but is probably not dead yet. She seemed as remote from real human concerns like getting old and paying the rent as some still un-ravished bride of slow time dancing frozen forever in the only kind of heaven I could believe in or long for. I wonder if she drank or did drugs. I wonder if anyone ever dumped her and, if so, how long after April of 1969 that happened. Did it happen when she was forty? Did it make being Ms. April of 1969 seem really empty when it happened?

Did she ever have to be careful not to let the mask slip? Not to be so real that she scared someone away who really just wanted to be with Ms. April of 1969 and not whoever became that to escape someone else? Was being Ms. April of 1969 someone she was trying to be to avoid being who she was, who whatever she came from had made her? Or did she know better all along? Was she in it for the money or did she somehow believe in the dream she became for so many staring at that page?

Would she be touched that someone still remembers after all this time and would still like to meet her, would still like to know who was real behind that mask, or would she rather forget? Would she rather have everyone just finally forget? Maybe she went off to teach school somewhere. Maybe Ms. April was just a way to get money for college and she now hopes that no one will ever remember. Or maybe she’s a waitress in a truck-stop somewhere. Has her life been good? Better than mine? Does she still think of herself as Ms. April of 1969? Does anyone love her and is she happy?  

Would she want to talk to me about those Sunday afternoons long ago and what was really going on in her life when she seduced a redneck kid she would never meet into a world of dreams where she was the girl and being a writer was the way the boy got the girl? Would she find it all very sad or would she be touched? Maybe she would be both sad and touched or maybe she would just wish that, after all this time, the last person whose dick she pulled long distance so long ago would finally get over it.

I can still see her face clearly, the face more clearly than anything even though her bare body was what made her so fascinating. How often have I stood naked just hoping to make someone look into my wounded eyes and remember me? Am I doing that now? Do any of the people I posed for as a figure model back in college remember me? Do they remember sad and wounded eyes that seemed to want to say something or the cuts I worked in the gym to maintain or what? Did they ever wonder why I was there and if I were just in it for the money?

Does Kristen Berg remember me? I meet Kristen at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of DeKalb. She was a French major who loved really strange moves and was in Cine’ Club while I was coordinator. She introduced me to Cronenberg’s work and told me after I told her about being a nudist that the Art Department was always looking for figure models and that, oddly enough, it was harder to find males to do this than females.

Kristen modeled and she was not just in it for the money. I got to know several people, male and female, who modeled and none of us were just in it for the money. Some of us wanted to be Ms. April once. I found this comforting to know. I’d always wanted to think that, at least sometimes, there were two hungers involved when desire was performed. Kristen might have loved me. She is another name on the list. How have I let so many slip away? Will there ever by another? One last mad bohemian who will forgive me for wasting my life and never making enough money to matter just because she has done the same? Someone who will listen to my stories and know that the last story I would ever want to tell would be the story of losing her, of adding one more name to the list of people who are “no longer with me” but as much with me still as the scars on my body?

Ms. April had everything to do with why I ended up naked in a drawing studio selling my image just as she had, just as Kristen did.  I went out a few times with one of the instructors I worked with. I think she wondered why I was there and knew I was not in it for the money. She is another lost Barbara on my list, a print maker who had been raised Mormon but stopped believing somewhere along the way. Joseph Smith was so strange and so seductive and so hard to walk away from without looking back. It’s strange how the things that let us down the most are the things that still haunt us at the end.

We saw movies at the Egyptian Theatre and talked in her upstairs apartment that overlooked the Paperback Grotto where they sold mostly porn. I think she was lonely and lost and wanted to talk about all the things she had lost and might have loved me in spite of everything if I had found the courage to tell her everything. The last I knew she was in Madison working as a plumber because the money was so much better than teaching Art or making Art. I was told after she left for Madison that she missed me and wanted me to visit. I wish I had.

In this moment I wish we were together with her making Art and me writing words and each of us not alone. I wish the list had ended with her, in a small apartment in Madison where we would get by somehow and love each other very much. How did I never visit? How did I let her slip away? What did I want more than those long conversations we would have when I could be sad or scared and know that she was sad and scared to and would not run or turn away? How strange that the Barbara I never married haunts me more than the Barbara I did. The list is so very long and so very sad and each name is a scar.

Some are deeper than others but each is a scar. I’ve yet to mention Eva. She modeled and streaked the NIU quad once at noon with someone named Timothy who was gay and modeled also. She is only a small scar but she is there, one of my two lost Hungarians, she sent me an e-mail form Europe after I was already in Houston. This was years after I’d last seen her and I was touched that she still remembered. Now she too is lost like tears in the rain and I will never find her again. I still have Jane’s email but do not want to reopen that wound now that I know that “please stop” said once more will change nothing. I still sit here alone saying “please stop” into her absence, knowing where to find her and knowing that she of all of them is more lost beyond recovery than any other.

I don’t really know what I’m doing now, right here at this very moment standing naked again, but I can’t help but do it even now that I’m all but certain there will never be any money to it. I’m not in it for the money and never was, never was when I was standing naked in the drawing studio and not now as I stand as naked in these words as I ever stood in my bare flesh, trying to show myself, trying to reveal the true flesh of memory I’m made from and make some connection to life, to whatever I was always in it for more than the money.

 I am a writer and this is what I write. I’ll keep doing this even if I never make a dime from any of it. I don’t know, at this point, if this is a blessing or a curse, proof that I still can’t be real or the only thing that does make me real, my life or what I do to avoid getting a life. I’m still looking for the girl as my hair turns grey and my time runs out. I’m still looking for the girl who will read this and love me. I’m still looking for the girl who can listen to my stories about the past and hear in them how tired I am of losing people and how much I want to tell all the stories to someone so they will know who I am and love me anyway.

How do you trust a love that has not been tested by hearing all the stories, even the ones that are about being awful to people you claimed to love? I’ve come to believe that not telling all the stories or refusing to hear them all is the worst betrayal and the biggest lie. I don’t want to lie anymore, not even trying to be loved. I want to tell the only truth I’ve lived, all of it, and still be loved when I finish telling my story. This is what it means to be the author. It means that someone somewhere loves you because they heard your story, loves you the way a half-blind kid loved Ms. April and will love you still after the Wizard of Oz steps from behind the curtain and says ‘this is all I am and have to give, is it enough for you”. I hope when Ms. April did that, if she ever reached the moment of needing to do that, that there was some one person out of all of us who saw her as Ms. April who was able to hug her and say yes and take her home again forever.