In My Room
The band was quirky. Strange time signatures. A trio of bearded men. I caught the eye of the drummer, having admired the soft hills of his biceps as his naked arms (tank top) beat the drums into submission. I wanted to cup those hills like I cupped the little head of my cat when I was a kid. That’s not all I wanted to cup.
1975. We danced in the back of the bar. He was smallish, with a cowboy hat, in town from Oregon only briefly. He was a ceramicist as well as a drummer. Or a jeweler. Or a welder. I was intent on getting him back to my PLACE, my room.
The room was a studio above a garage. I needed the drummer to see my audio equipment, part of my seduction artifacts. My stereo set had an eight-track cassette player in which I rotated the two, and only two, eight-tracks I owned — a classical saw horse of medieval choral work, its name lost to memory, something “rondo?” — and the soundtrack to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” We could laugh at that. It was the assortment of vinyl that was most important; arranged seductively and invitingly to ensure that any visitor would find my taste dazzling and utterly cool. Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, Joan Baez, Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Beach Boys, Paul Butterfield Blues Band. I had a collection that could belong to a lanky adolescent boy who knew many chords on the guitar. In fact, I myself had a guitar. It, too, traveled to every BIG ROOM (I seemed to often live in one big room in which my identity could be strewn around like stars, visible at every angle), and was propped like a Vogue model against the wall. My “Kay” classic, nylon string guitar had a blue fabric star affixed to it (the star is long gone, lost among its travels, but the faint shape of it remains).
The drummer could see my collection of dangly earrings affixed to a homemade screen-in-a-frame. These earrings were multiple inches in length, most purchased in Greenwich Village when my father would drive me and a best friend (we were fourteen) into the city from New Jersey, drop us off on 8th street, and he’d head up to off-track betting parlors, picking us up later. The earrings were like tiny chandeliers, and the more beads the better. They were cheap; they didn’t hang heavy, and they made for a sparkling assortment of décor that also signaled “a hippie girl lives here.” Proceed.
The drummer peered at the cork board where I posted iconic images — me looking tough and pert in a Wonder Woman T-shirt, me kissing a statue of Alice in Wonderland. On the lips. Small fragments of paper with quotations that pulled efficiently for emotional resonance and signaled my depth were pinned to the board. “nobody/not even the rain/has such small hands” (e.e. cummings). “What is essential is invisible to the eye” (Antoine St. Exupery, The Little Prince).
Books. My god, the books. Endless hours spent arranging treasured copies of Candide, Catcher in the Rye, Look Homeward Angel, Siddartha, The Jungle Book, On the Road, Jules Feiffer cartoon books, and City Lights editions of Howl, and Ferlinghetti. I rotated the order on the shelves. You couldn’t pin me down! You think you got me from some sci-fi, then you saw philosophy, then poignant children’s books. My own collection fascinated me.
I did cup those biceps, in between the bright blue Marimekko sheets and the Pendleton blanket. I remember absolutely nothing about the sex. From the Danish wooden platform bed, my eyes moved with satisfaction over all I surveyed — small inlaid boxes, fragments of Indian carpet, bowls no bigger than the palm of my hand in which to drop a pair of earrings, a few paper clips, and some loose change.
In the morning the drummer plucked at my guitar while I pulled on tight jeans and stood looking out the picture window, at the Tudor style house across the road, and the Long Island Sound right behind it. I was in an upscale community with lots of families and I didn’t belong there. I’d never be in a place like that again. It was both rapturous and lonely.
“I think it’s okay,” you know, the drummer said, his black hair swept around like a wig.
“What is?” I asked.
“You know, sleeping with friends. Anyway, I’m in love with Jenny. She’s been in the band.”
From my sudden fugue state as he described her long red hair, I saw on my bulletin board “Let us open our hearts like a flower and be passive and receptive.” Unatrributed.
I didn’t know this guy. I’m not sure I really liked him. But in that place, that room, that bed, that age, it was most important that he want me; that I not be considered just “a friend.” I lived in that studio another year, and had many visitors, hoping one would see all the parts of my room so clearly they would cherish me.
I’d eventually move out, of course, and my stuff spread out into larger places, and mingled with others’ precious things. But in a series of rooms, for quite a while, I wasn’t real. I was a museum.
