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There's gotta be a record of you someplace
You gotta be on somebody's books
The lowdown - a picture of your face
Your injured looks
The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And it's your face I'm looking for on every street
- Excerpt from On Every Street - Lyric by Mark Knopfler
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My formal education began in the Bronx, as did my informal one. Born in the Fifties, a boob-tube child like the rest of the members of my class, we grew up watching old reruns of The Mickey Mouse Club and Jack Ruby gunning down Lee Oswald live as it happened. The television ruled the roost in our apartment – occupying a place in the living room that afforded it the best view of us in our captive mental state. It taught us life lessons, the kind once entrusted to stories from the Bible. It babysat us while Mom busied herself in another room, or when visiting in a neighbor’s apartment. By the time I reached school age, I was already addicted to cathode rays.
I’ve always exhibited a distorted opinion regarding the opposite sex. It comes from a blending of B-movie romance, situation comedy pathos, with an added dash of Archie comic book philosophy, just to give literature its due. I started my schooling as a blank emotional slate and spent the entire first year in kindergarten undergoing a crash socialization course. I quickly learned that girls were vicious when provoked and best left to more experienced and courageous hands. I’ve carried a little of that ominous respect inside me ever since.
On the first day of First Grade, we sat in the auditorium and listened for our names to be called for class assignments. Once all the names were read and associated tiny bodies gathered together, we followed our teacher up the stairs to our classroom. That was the first time I noticed her. She was slight, even for a six-year-old, a wisp set to vanish easily in a moving crowd or be swept away by a southerly breeze. Her skin was dark, like mine, from the summer sun and the cat’s-eyeglasses, unflattering to most faces, gave hers an air of the exotic. I was mesmerized by her from that day forward.
We attended the same class from First through Fifth Grades. She played the smart-as-a-whip fast-tracking female on the main stage on one side of the room while I worked the lounge opposite, combining my infantile comedy with a soon-to-seem stale routine involving disappearing homework. She appeared to ignore my worst efforts while I admired her best and so it went for years on end. During the Christmas vacation in the Fourth Grade, I recall seeing her in the distance, accompanying her mother down Buhre Avenue towards Crosby. At that point in our “relationship” I didn’t know where she lived, only that I never, ever, saw her coming from or going to school. Nevertheless, there she was, at that singular moment, strutting down the avenue across the street from my position, wearing white go-go boots and heading off to wherever with her mom. The boots threw me; she always wore fashionable attire, but didn’t appear slavish to fads. It served as a lasting image of her for me.
We grew up together, but it wasn’t until the spring season in the Fifth Grade that I summoned enough strength to express, ever so subtly, my interest in her. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I noticed her walking home on the Jarvis Avenue side of PS 71 with a younger girl by her side. I sidled up from behind and politely asked if I could walk with them. That was a highly uncharacteristic move for me, but I did it. Hell, it took me five years, so maybe it’s totally in character. In any case, we walked together, us three, and spoke the universal kid language: television. She could do a killer impression of Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. Like me, she preferred The Addams Family over The Munsters. Even up close, she was perfect. I had finally approached the monolith and fallen in, after a near lifetime of distant surveillance.
“My God … it’s full of stars.”
Looking back on it, the route we took seems odd. Walking from the school down Jarvis, we crossed the street where it ended at Buhre and made our way down to the corner across from my apartment building and then away from it over to the other side of Westchester Avenue. It’s only occurring to me now that she followed a path meant to avoid moving directly past my place of residence. Realization dawns late in some people … count me among them.
We continued walking and walking until we were nearly to Pelham Parkway, across from the general hospital. That’s where she lived, and her little friend nearby. I made that trip with her a few times, and we seemed to be getting on better during class, when multiple disasters struck. My arches fell suddenly and painfully. I was fitted for special shoes and issued orders from on high not to go off on any excursions. The school year ended with the announcement from our teacher that I would be moving with my family to Long Island. The cheers from the school staff drowned out my sobs. I knew it was pointless to pursue anything further with my new not-so-distant acquaintance, what with a move measured in light-years on the horizon. I did catch a glimpse of her one last time, a couple of years later, playing with some other children in front of her house as we drove past perpendicular to her street just off the parkway.
Over the years, I’ve thought about her … hoped for her success and happiness, feared her fate, but always in a casual manner. I played down my old feelings until they amounted to just a bit of background noise drifting in and out of conscious recognition. Recently, I got it into my head that I wanted to know something about her. Was she married with a brood of children? Did she serve time in jail for stealing a car? Curiosity took hold of me, so I Googled her name, thinking myself ready for anything.
One of the first entries in the list redirected to a memorial page from a recent high school reunion. I examined the high school picture of her. The cat’s-eyeglasses were gone, but she still wore glasses. She looked almost the same as I remembered her from grade school, only a little older. Stationed above the picture and below her name stood the effective dates: 1956 – 1988. I feel somewhat dopey to admit that my heart sank a little for both of us, but mostly me. I took a breath and began reading the details, expecting the mundane disease or unfortunate accident as cause of death.
I have a bad habit of being verbally profane and it could be said that I’m making excuses for my lax morals on the grounds of special circumstance, but I can’t explain the continuing appearance in my life of these “what-the-@!$%#” moments. It wasn’t a disease or some inattentive driver that took her life. She was on a plane, coming home from London after completing an assignment in her role as an art designer, when a bomb exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. It happened over twenty years ago – I had lived the ensuing decades in blissful ignorance. Pan AM flight 103, to this point, amounted to a news story for me, an unfortunate tale relayed in flickering images on the television screen, but no more real than Gilligan or Goober Pyle. Suddenly, this incident from long ago explodes out of its time capsule; the shrapnel cutting open my past and destroying a piece of me.
It’s fair, if not totally realistic, to say that I’m shaken by this news, yellowed and curling at the edges as it is. I’m sad and I’m angry and I’m lost in a time warp. Nothing I ever saw on television prepared me to face the prospect of my past being rendered moot. The search for a lost love that exists only as an internal, and eternal, concept amounts to a long walk in the dark, stretching nearly to Pelham Parkway.
A three-chord symphony crashes into space
The moon is hanging upside down
I don't know why it is I'm still on the case
It's a ravenous town
And you still refuse to be traced
Seems to me such a waste
And every victory has a taste that's bittersweet
And it's your face I'm looking for on every street
- Excerpt from On Every Street - Lyric by Mark Knopfler
