Laurel
After that night Mike started dropping by my place on an almost daily basis. He would bring his guitar and try to teach me to accompany him. He had been to the Berkeley school of music in Boston a short while (or so he claimed). He was a patient teacher and with him I came as close as I ever would to being a musician. He had a guitar and a mandolin. I learned to accompany him with the guitar on the two compositions he wrote.
I introduced him to Bones that first week. But Bones didn’t like him, telling me he seemed dishonest and spelled trouble. He didn’t come to our poker games but he did show up for most of our parties, where all of my other friends liked or at least tolerated him. He boasted a lot which put some people off. But in one boast he wasn’t kidding, the beauty of his girlfriend Laurel. About a month after we met she finally did appear. I was with him to greet her at the bus station and we took her that night to the Pacific Film Archives, a fancy, modern structure right off campus, which was a movie theater and also a museum of modern art. We toured the museum and she was impressed. Also the patchouli girl had recently moved out and I talked to my landlord and secured them the small apartment in the back of the house. She had the money to pay the rent and deposit. Mike never had more than a few dollars in his pocket, probably borrowed from her (thus the missed poker games). So we became neighbors, to everyone’s delight.
After her arrival Mike’s estimation in all my friend’s minds rose considerably, from something near a crazy bum to a person with an amazing girlfriend. She was slender, blond, with a rare, beautiful face and a very feminine grace in all her movements and voice and was a very talented artist besides. There was a small landing or porch at the top of the stairs to their apartment which opened to the kitchen. It was just large enough for one chair, and on any nice day she would sit out on it with the door open and sketch for hours, sunning herself.
I noticed a distinct increase of male friends dropping by my place on such days, hoping to see her there. John Seebach absolutely fell in love with her. In her presence you always felt like drawing a chair from the table for her to sit. She brought out politeness in everyone. And she wasn’t shy. She’d come downstairs sometimes just to sit and chat with me. I showed her my poem ‘Ryan’s Day’ and she wanted to illustrate it, to help get it published. I still have a few of the pictures she drew for it, right at my table. I also showed her some poetry, older stuff. Some of it she liked, but a few really moved her, like Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude’, especially the last stanza. When I read it to her at one party, late at night, she begged me to write it out for her the next day. She came to my room the next morning. I copied it out on a sheet. I would have copied out the whole book for her, as she sat so close to me at my table, shoulder to shoulder, and watched with curious delight as I transcribed it in the best penmanship I could manage:
See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost
And breathe and walk again.
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening Paradise.
She graced several of our most memorable parties. But she had to find work as soon as she moved in. She was lucky and scored a job she liked, as a waitress in the small restaurant at the Pacific Film Archives, four or five days a week, mostly weekends. She paid all the bills while Mike just talked. She loved my set of friends and musicians and our bohemian ways, charmed Steve S. and Larry and John, and all our poker crew, because besides being so feminine, she had no fear of men, a sort of Marlene Dietrich bonhomie. So she’d join us on a Friday evening, a room full of guys just getting started on our partying, join in on our conversations for a few hours then leave, to get her sleep for the next day’s work. She did do lines when the party was ‘right’ for her, no work the next morning, when she liked the crowd, the conversations interesting and with their ‘Siren songs’, drawing her in. But she always restrained herself and drank moderately. I never saw her drunk. She controlled her body.
I think all my friends had a secret crush on her, not so secret when she broke up with Mike a year later, sick of his boasting talk, his joblessness and erratic behavior, which just got worse as time went on. We all saw that coming six months before it happened. They’d argue upstairs with the door open and we’d hear it. I could never figure out why he ruined the relationship and lost such a rare, supporting girlfriend. Many of the hours she spent with us was just to forget about him, as he wasn’t there most often. He would disappear for days and not even tell us where he’d been, much less her. So as time went on the element of pity, of feeling sorry for her situation, crept in, making all of us even more endeared to her, for all she was going through. Even Bone’s showed her respect and hated Mike all the more more for his shoddy treatment of her. May would sometimes visit her for chats, guessing at that stage that she might be in need of a confidant.
