Out In The 1970s Be-Bop Night- The Girl With The Pale Blue Eyes-Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He was getting ready to leave her again, leave her like he had so many times before, and like he would probably do again. He had a half-ironic vision that in forty or fifty years if he was still alive he would still be leaving her, or still be working his way back to her. That forty or fifty year thought didn’t faze him, didn’t cause him pain, and didn’t make him tremble. Didn’t make him tremble that maybe there would not be a forty or fifty years, that she would cut it off, or he would before then. That was outside the box of their relationship and always had been in the now numberless times they had danced this dance. They both agreed, sometimes with a laugh, sometimes in maniacal rage, that was just the way it was between them and had been from about the first time they met a decade or so back in the mid-1970s.

As he packed his belongings to head out for wherever he was heading this time he had a moment’s confusion. Like the other times, that numberless times, it was not clear where he would go, west to California, east on some tramp steamer to Morocco and some Kasbah hash den, north on the hitchhike trail before the snows set in and then south to the Baja, he didn’t know until he left out the door and walked some distance, maybe picked up a ride and that would decide it. All he knew was he was, she was, in a place neither of them wanted to be and so he would cast his fates to the wind. And he thought too, as he had thought so many times before when this damn interlude came upon them, about how he had met, or almost didn’t meet, his girl with the pale blue eyes.

Soldier Johnson had to laugh about that last fact, about how they had almost not met, or rather how he had almost not connected with his Jewel, Jewel Samson, the woman he was now about to leave again. Back then Soldier had thought that he had blown the dust of old North Adamsville off his shoes after he finished his military service and so his return, his painful return, back to his growing up hometown after he had busted out for the umpteenth time on the West Coast was quite a letdown. After one painful exchange with his distraught mother who made it her personal responsibility to remind him constantly that at thirty- two he needed to get on with his life, needed to get a job, get married, get to whatever he had to do and in response to that also numberless tirade he had fled out the door and headed to Adamsville Beach to cool out a bit.

[Soldier (real name Lawrence) Johnson had gotten that name, that moniker, while in basic training down at Fort Dix in New Jersey from the other raw recruits who kidded him about his non-existent soldierly deportment. He had done more drill sergeant-inspired push-ups for unmade bunks, footloose foot lockers, misshapen uniforms than anyone thought possible. More extra- duty KP (kitchen patrol for the civilians), more confined to quarters, more night guard duty, well, more of everything that most common grunts (enlisted men) would go well out of their way to avoid.

But the name stuck, stuck through hell-hole Vietnam where he was not the worst soldier, not at all, taking a little shrapnel to save a buddy, taking point out in that bloody Mekong Delta, swampy, fly-infested night and, mainly against all odds surviving the experience. Well physically surviving it because when he got home his old corner boys kept the name on him and kept it on him after they had heard his exploits for about the ten thousandth time. And it also stuck through the post -soldier internal war, including a stint at the VA hospital and another under the lost soul bridges of Southern California that he waged within himself. FJ]

He walked that day the two miles to the beach from the family house so by the time that he got to the his favored boyhood spot near the North Adamsville Yacht Club and sat on the seawall to catch a cool breeze it was getting a little late. He had no sooner settled in for a serious think than Jewel came walking by with her girlfriend, Laura. Came walking by like something out of the mist of time, like maybe a 1940s pin-up model all the guys overseas would cherish inside their lockers or on the inner lid of their trunks in some forlorn barracks in some forlorn outpost of civilization, maybe some rock of land surrounded by infinite Pacific seas or Normandy fogs. Or maybe a 1940s movie star, maybe Lana Turner, all in white when she sizzled up the screen and sizzled up poor clueless John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Jewel came all dressed in white, white blouse, white shorts, short showing long well-thought out legs and well-turned ankles, white socks hugging white tennis shoes, and even from a distance of ten feet he could see, set off by her well- developed summer tan, those pale blue eyes that would haunt his dreams forever after.

And those eyes would cause him more hell and anguish than he ever imaged. Funny see because it didn’t have to have happened that way, didn’t have to have happened at all. Still caught up in his mother-inflamed big think Soldier had let her pass by, let her go in his thoughts without comment. But as she passed by he switched from thoughts of getting a job, or whatever else of the twenty-one demands his mother insisted he pursue to thoughts of how this young passing woman, or rather one with her look, her sultry virginal look (yah, he knew that was a contradiction but it was all tied up with his Catholic upbringing and those novena –driven girls from the neighborhood and his teenage boy thoughts, corner boy-driven thought, of hot women inflamed by magazines, television, the movies so make of it what you will) had always eluded him, had always been outside his grasp.

In high school, maybe starting in freshman year, he and his friends, his corner boys, would hit Adamsville Beach right where he was sitting at that moment and watch, no, more than watch, leer, as the girls went by, the girls who would be dressed very much like Jewel, would sway in the sun very much like Jewel, would fill the very air with their presence. While other guys, particularly guys like Frankie Riley and Timmy Kelly, would have those swaying girls all in white by the dozens he had no such luck as much as they inflamed his schoolboy heart. At night, summer nights, when the girls turned from white shorts to white dresses he also struck out. He seemed to get either the black-etched arty types or the bookworms, especially the bookworms of indeterminate dress. And white- dressed girls were not bookworms, were not even concerned about books for all he knew. Later, before ‘Nam, he settled for the bookish types and left it at that. After‘Nam he took whatever came his way, mainly fast and loose women who would not dream of wearing white, or be accused of dreaming about much of anything. But he never in the back of his mind really ever stopped thinking that someday he might snatch one. Never missed an opportunity to stare at them, younger or older, when they passed by ignoring him.

That day he could see that she was younger, maybe too much younger than he was (they would laugh, cry, make fun about that difference, that twelve year difference as it turned out since she was only twenty, a sophomore in college, at the time), and so he let the thing go by as just another fantasy and that was that. Then, as fate would have it, the pair of young women walked back up past the yacht club again near the place where he was sitting and from out of nowhere, or maybe out of that boyhood angst, he called out to them, called out to the girl with the pale blue eyes that her eyes were pretty.

She looked at him, startled, like nobody had ever made that comment to her before. Being, as he found out later, a gentile young woman, she came over and asked him if he was speaking to her. That was all the opening he needed, well, almost the only opening, once he asked her name and what she did. It turned out that she was a student at Boston University a place where he had gone a couple of years before he busted out about a decade before and wound up getting drafted into the damn army. Something in her manner gave him the impression she was looking for something, or maybe it was something in his kindly manner (that kindly thing, as she mentioned later, was what kept her on that seawall) that set her off. Laura had to go, or had made some other excuse to leave them, but Jewel decided to sit on the seawall with him. They sat for hours talking, talking about this and that, about the travails of school life, about busted dreams, hers too, about Vietnam and his lost decade, about musical likes (many shared), movies (they both loved film noir), lots of things almost making stuff up just to not leave that wall. And also both getting just slightly flirty along the way. There was a lot more of that, that flirty then hesitation, before they became a couple. That day though strangely enough started it, started their rocky road. Started with those pale blue eyes.