KDX 500

A year or so ago, I met again the one girl who ruined me for life, D'Arby. She's called D'Arby (by me only) because she always reminded me of Patti D'Arbanville from Chevy Chase's movie “Modern Problems.” So out of nowhere, I received a phone call and from it piped, “Ronnnnnie!” I knew exactly who it was. A second or so later she complained I was still “sickeningly” stable as my phone number hasn't changed in over 25 years, but was glad that it still was the same as she found me quickly.

It had been probably a good 18 years since I saw her last.

She quickly skipped over the reason why she had called when I asked her and went straight to the “We are gonna hang out, right?” She suggested a Chinese restaurant over by Mineral Spring and I accepted the idea. We had planned to meet in the parking lot and told each other what kind of cars we were now driving, to help identify you know. God knows how much each of us has changed in those years, perhaps to the point of being unrecognizable?

So, a week went by before we could meet up and I reminisced over that meteoric romance we had had. No, it wasn't that fast, more like a bolide that just crosses the sky slowly, with flaring too bright to look at long, before it explodes in an even more blinding flash.

**

How did she ruin me? Let's go back to 1988.

D'Arby had the audacity, the confidence, to let me have the entire candy store. Nothing was held back. She had grown up loving excitement of any kind, a true adrenaline junkie. D'Arby had one hell of an addiction. Before we were an item, I once saw her tear assing around on a KDX 500 dirtbike on those trails that criss-cross the Coventry sand dunes. Cut off jeans, a tube top and pink sneakers with no helmut and ripping along the pines she was. She had more balls than a guy at times. She wasn't just a tomboy. There wasn't anything truly masculine about her except her love of chasing thrills. She was all girl otherwise. I too, loved the adrenaline rush, but in a more staid kind of way. I would make sure there were life boats, life preservers and other equipment around should I topple. D'Arby wanted none of those. She complained I was a bit restrained at times too. But she managed to get me to overcome that idea of safety at times, to my initial leaping fear.

D'Arby had a pretty face, a tight body and partied like a sorority girl from Chico State. When around her, I didn't feel I had to cover up any of my faults...I was just me, the good and the bad. We, from the outset, were very comfortable around each other. Things just fell into place w/o any trying on our part. There were no moments when we found each other being “halting” around one another. What ever our personal neuroses we had, they seemed to disappear. It was liberation to be ourselves, in an instant.

Together, we could dive into most things w/o much hesitation, including each other.

As with most women, they “peel” like an artichoke (how's that for a metaphor). What I mean as I got to know her, as she allowed me to get to know her, she surprised me time and again as the layers came off. D'Arby in public, cultivated something of a dumb blonde personality. It's pretty useful around guys I suppose, as it can turn us to putty and therefore, manipulable. But as D'Arby “peeled,” I found out this girl was no dummy. She had shocked me one time on Block Island, by pointing to the horizon and saying, “Those are cumulonimbus clouds.” I turned around to her in a bit of shock as she was right. I had, at one time, had this geeky flirtation with the weather. As a boy, I had come across a Boy Scout's book on weather and in it, all types of clouds. For some reason, the weird names and pictures stuck with me. Now here was this girl, startling my superficial estimations of her...I hadn't learned everything about her yet I find out. When I learned more...more epiphanies about this girl shown themselves. She slowly revealed a labyrinthine personality that could take months to investigate.

I stood there and looked at her, learning once again, on how women can surprise you with who they really are, once they decide to let you in, a layer at a time. I came to know D'Arby as something more complex than this fun loving chick. And that was dangerous...as I crawled deeper into this newly discovered pyramid, so did my heart.

In short, D'Arby was the whole package. Or, what a 25 year old guy thinks is a whole package in a woman. For years after that blazing relationship ended, I had tried to re-create it in other women I was with. There' a problem though, there is only one D'Arby. Every other woman are what they are in of themselves too. But I could never find/recreate what I had in that time.

I once found myself dating a very stable single Mom of two girls. She was gainfully employed, emotionally stable and the kids were great. One date had us, the Mom and girls, choosing Easter outfits at Nordstroms once. I sat there in the women's department, thinking to myself..'Shit, this is what you've come too?” My time with D'Arby was sooo influential, sooo fun...that it was the litmus paper I used for other romances. The Italians call it a “thunderbolt.” It's the one girl that grabs you forever.

Well, like all blazing meteors, or bolides..they burn out. D'Arby ended it all rather abruptly with me though I had been “let in” further and further to her heart via the “peeling effect.” Shit...I had fell in love!

For a couple of weeks I couldn't let go. I wasn't a stalker but I kept trying to get a reason out of her for ending it. She was sheepish and parried my questions till she got the guts, or perhaps annoyed with my digging, to finally tell me her truth.

“I'm bored.” she said.

“Bored? Bored? With all we have been doing?” I was kinda shocked. It wasn't boring to me at all.

“Yeah..and you've changed in the past month...look..you're soo affectionate now...not that I don't like that but this is going somewhere else than what it was.”

She goes on...

“Ronnie..I don't think I was ever in love with any guy..or ever fell in love...I guess I'm broken in that sort of way...I don't know...I don't know why I am like this.”

Well, she had told me the truth...it wasn't a dodge. Shouda' seen it comin' as they say. D'Arby was not the marrying kind.

**

2014. Dragon Villa

I had gotten there early, sitting in my car and rather excited to see her again. I kept trying to tell myself not to expect a smooth skinned, tight 21 year old girl. I was 50 and she'd be 48 now. But I still romanticized what I thought I'd see. Hell, with my memories, how could I not?

She pulled in and I recognized her quickly. As we both approached one another in the parking lot, as the details of her face came into view, I thought, “Shit, D'Arby...you got OLD!”

A nanosecond later I thought this: “You do realize she's thinking the same thing about YOU too!”

Once inside, once we had received our tropical drinks, we started playing catch up. We both surprised one another about the changes that have happened in each other's lives.

“I'd never figured you'd become a nurse” I told her. “You never did like school.”

“And you? Last time I saw you were applying to grad schools..and now you work in healthcare dietary.” she replied.

We both came to the conclusion that life pushes you around in strange ways, and end up at destinations you'd never figure you'd arrive at.

“God...you still have that lion's man of hair...that was so handsome on you...but it's pure WHITE now!”

I was a bit miffed at that...backhanded compliments you know. Ah...what am I going to do about it.

I did compliment on her ability, or luck or whatever, to be thin as a rail still.

“I got fat as a cow for years.” She told me. “I got disgusted with myself, sad..for years...didn't date. I finally hired a nutritionist and with her help, I managed to get down to a healthy weight. I probably was just depressed for years and let everything go....till I got tired of it all.”

I could never imagine her obese...never. But she swore on a stack of Bibles she had become so for a good while. Still, it didn't seem possible to me. But she had assured me she had.

We talked about the old times we both had together and how she still, at 48, enjoyed a thrill now and again, but the volume on that had been turned waay down.

All of a suddne she perks up and says, “Hey, let's go to Misquamicut, to the Windjammer...let's go like old times.”

“Windjammer? That place is even still there? I had no idea.

“Maybe? Let's go anyway...remember the Huey Lewis concert...after?” she says...with a wry smile.

“Yeah..i remember.” I say.

I then say, after thinking about what she might be up to, “What D'Arby...you want to get caught fucking in my car like we did then? It's daylight out now! We'd be nailed in a few minutes!”

She laughed...and felt absolutely no shame in it now..nor then as I remember it.

“God...the times we had...ahh..that didn't bug me that the loading crew saw us.”

“You haven't changed, D'Arby”I said.

“Neither have you...I mention going to Misquamicut and already you are looking to be cautious.”

“Ah, it was just a joke, we can't go...I have to see my sister later on...I can't be that girl anymore anyways.” she said.

**

We promised to keep in touch, but you know how that goes. Work schedules, life interfering, the fact we had changed and trying to recapture the past is futile. We both were much wiser now. We drifted apart again in time.

Do I regret ever knowing her? Do I regret the ruination I had for being able to have the entire candy store to myself, again and again? How I tried to recreate that later on. Do I regret how she opened me up, made me grow by leaps and bound and also how she made me sting when she ended it all?

Do I regret being treated as a KDX 500 dirtbike, or how I treated her likewise? Tearing around being young and irresponsible?

Nope.

        Patti D'Arbanville from Modern Problems...pretty close approximation 

Desolated Angel

“I have nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion.”

Kerouac

This happened a long time ago...

In this blog I've written about Traci, the runaway from Zanesville, OH that come into our crew that hung out in Slater Park around 1982. God, so long ago now. At 15, she was eased out of her house when her mother remarried and both Mom and the new beau, decided they didn't want the baggage of a young teen around them. Traci was ignored and abandoned while the couple had a year long honeymoon, taking off to Chicago, parting and otherwise enjoying the idea of being a “childless couple” by choice. It went on to the point where Traci finally lit off on I-70 east to New York City.

“They didn't want me around anymore.” was the repeated phrase she would tell me often enough.

She hadn't made it to NYC when I had met her. She'd hitchhike her way east and be picked up by truckers and what not and be deposited at their destinations, none of which was anything like a Big City. As I got to know her and the teenage runaway lifestyle, it was “Gas, Ass or Grass: No One Rides for Free” that got her her rides. She was ditched in Pawtucket by some guy she met in Foxboro who just got rid of her once he was done. She had ended up in Foxboro after a trucker ditched her at a Greasy Spoon restaurant. She was still trying to make it to NYC, where she believed she could make a fun life there. In her young teen head, NYC (specifically Greenwich Village) would fix everything, if she could only get there.

“I want to be an artist...and the best artists are in Greenwich Village.” she told me.

Traci was one of those girls who never grew past five foot two. When I had met her, she was lucky enough to have been born rather pretty, albeit too short for model status. She had shoulder length sandy blonde hair with a shaved patch, straight back from her left ear for a few inches. That was a short lived hairstyle for girls who aped the 80's punk style. Add to that feather earnings that hung down, tight ass jeans, Pony sneakers and a green/black flannel shirt that accentuated her breasts. To my 18 year old boy's mind, she was hot, although teenage runaway dirty. A boho dirty if you will.  She had one strange aspect about her though, her eyes didn't track right. I'm sure you've seen people where one eye tracks you fine but the other is just ever so slightly off. I paid little attention to it then but years later when I was working for the deaf I had told this very same story to one guy who was stone cold deaf and he perked up. He signed, “That's strabismus...girls who have that are fucked up in the head beyond belief, and they put out like hell too.” I took that as gospel and the only reason why I did was that the deaf population can read body language like a book. I have found them to be right more often than not. But I didn't know that in 1982.

When she first met us, she worked rather quickly at determining which boy could offer her a place to stay, shower and wash her soiled clothing. I couldn't take strays home as there was no way my Mom nor brother would allow that. Damn! Jack, who's parents didn't give a damn what he did, nor who he brought home, managed to get her to stay with him. His home was a sort of bus station for the occasional down and out brother, sister, cousin, friend or whatnot. They'd stay there for a while then zip onto somewhere else.

She worked us boys with her skills at flirtation, which looking back on it all, was pretty advanced for a 16 year old. She managed to get free food, free lodgings and some newer clothing from us just by giving the boys the right amount of attention. “Hmm..you're cute...I might fuck you if things go well.” The mere hope of getting into her pants, was enough for us teens to bend over backwards for her. Like I said, she was good. But then again, she apparently had to learn these skills well as she hoofed it across all these miles. She had learned all about female sexual power quick.

One day, by the pond in Slater Park, I was talking to her about Zanesville, as I never had really traveled before. She had told me her favorite spot there was a bluff overlooking a muddy colored river that ran north to south there. I had told her that a favorite place of mine, where I could get away from everybody, either to fish, catnap or just stare into space was a hilly area near the Central Pond that was way in the back of Slater Park, where the Seekonk/Rehoboth woods really began. She perked up and wanted to see it.

Traci never went anywhere w/o her backpack. She treated it like I treat my wallet, you never leave it anywhere and I suppose she couldn't, her entire life was in there. She picked it up and off we went.

Once we got to the escarpment overlooking the pond, she began to unwind, talk more deeply about who she was. All I heard were stories of a lost soul type of girl, who never did have any anchor of any kind. No family stability, no stability in school, not even any real order in her head. As we talked further, out came dreams and fantasies about what she wanted her life to be. As she talked, the look on her face changed due to her own delving into that deep water of forgetfulness. You go down so deep the truth of your own life disappears. Years later I learned that this was called “dissociation.” We all do it, it's called daydreaming, but some of us take that and make a full length movie out of it, she did. As she spoke of what/where she wanted to be, she in her own mind, actually “went there” and it shone all over her face.

I suppose she thought me trustworthy, or at least no threat at all, or perhaps on her own wavelength when she asked me if I wanted to read her poetry, see her drawings. She trusted me enough then to let me see a bit closer. She dug into her backpack and took out a sketchbook and a beat up five subject notebook for me to read.

I now know, when a girl hands you her own written poems, you're in.

What I read was a mess. A mess in syntax and structure and of subject matter. Poems to me are rhymed or just free versed. I think she had no idea she was doing free verse, let alone if she even know what it was. Many of the poems were all about her loneliness, her inability to find the right way, to even live life successfully. A “I Don't Know Who I Am or What I Want Out of Life” was the jist of many of them. Her inner life was of confusion and one of escape. Add to that the teen girl fantasy, a princess fantasy, of finding that guy who would solve all her problems just with love kind of poems.

“What do you think?” she asks.

Of course, I couldn't tell her what I really thought. I white lied a comment that could be taken for what it was. “Traci...this stuff is really frantic.” I said. And it was.

“Ain't it though? I just let my mind run wild when I write!” she said.

I flipped through her sketchbook and to my surprise, she really could draw. The pictures were all charcoal drawings, fantastical, mostly of girls in some DreamLand-scape. Below is an approximation of what she drew. 

“You really can draw...I can't...never could. You probably could do something in art.” I told her. She was truly pleased with my view.

For a while, we didn't talk, just lay on that grass, looking around when she said.

“Ronnie, you're really nice..kind...I haven't met a lot of kind guys at all...” I had no answer to that, just perhaps a “thanks.” She had sized me up and told me her verdict of me.

I wasn't expecting the next statement though.

“You want to fuck me though, don't you?” she said.

Being 18..my only answer to that was an emotional, sort of drawn out, almost plaintive, with a rising intonation...”Yeaaaahhh..” I was starting to like her more and more..but not just in a sexual way and I suppose she could tell too.

She broke off eye contact with me, looked in her lap when she says: “Ronnie, you don't want to know me, not really...you don't know my past...” She had an awful estimation of herself, apparently. I later could only guess she wasn't too happy with all she had done in the past months to “make it” all the way out here being a runaway. Though with her being spaced out 24/7, her desperate attempts to forget the “now,” she turned and was completely with it, completely engaged for a few minutes when she told me, warned me about who she was. She had to have some moments of lucidity I guess...to make it this far.

I was let down by her saying this, but it was true from her heart I now know. Here she was, with perhaps some morals left, perhaps some heart...protecting me from herself. “You don't want to know me...”

Then in keeping with ability to fly into fantasy, she gets up, starts twisting around in a sort of dance saying, “See! I can dance like that redwing!” Being 18, seeing how a female can just smoothly turn and twist w/o so much of an effort, was hypnotic. “Yeah..tons of redwings here..they're all over this pond!” was all I could say.

**

Then one day she was gone. She had left us, just poof...and that was it. Our little group hadn't figured out who she had met to move on but she had met someone, perhaps another trucker, or some car she had hopped into and off she went, perhaps to Greenwich Village...perhaps Stonington, CT...ever closer to NYC.

She'd be 46 now..or dead, I have no clue.

It's funny how you meet some people, even just for a short time, and you don't forget about them.