Memory of a Summer Girl

The death of David Bowie has taken me back to the time when I first heard his music.  It was in an ice cream store on the boardwalk.  What days those were.  Sad thing I did not realize how special they were.

What could I possibly remember from those hot summer days I lived so many seasons ago?  All human memory fades with time.   True memory even in the strictest mental disciplinarian's reckoning is elusive.   Memories become coated with a patina that imparts romanticism and mutes the past hours' reality with overtones of nostalgia and warmth.

Thinking on the passage of time it is nigh onto 33 years since my eyes first scanned her form, that coworker who would be my first love.  At our first meeting I did not realize she would be the first true love of my life.   How could I have known as my myopic eyes ran up and down her supple body that what I would eventually feel for her would be the measure against which all other romantic interludes of my life would be weighed? 

1974 was the year and the Imperial Presidency of Richard M. Nixon was about to end.  (Do you remember dear reader those funny euro-empire style uniforms Tricky Dick  made the White House guards wear for a time; the yellow ones with the epaulets and the feathered plumes?)   I digress.  It was 1974 and I was 18 years of age, legal to vote, legal to drink and ready to leave the nest.   Summer was upon me and once again I was at the beach.

My first real beach job had come to me through the intervention of my cousin.  Initially I was to take a job with him full time as a salesman at his card store.   However over the winter things as they say had changed.  During the winter my cousin had begun playing hide the salami with a young lass on a regular basis.    So as to insure his ready access to the preferred silo for his moisture missile he needed her to have a reason to be at the beach, and thus my job vanished.   She got the salesclerk's post and I was offloaded on a business friend of cousin a short Jewish gentleman named Phil.   Where was I to work, well at an ice cream stand named Kurly Kustard.

I don't remember our introduction, but I know it was in the small front space of that purveyor of soft serve extraordinaire Kurly Kustard.  The first real memory I have of her was during the distribution of the cups.  I think we were given a choice of four cups between the four of us employees.   Cocaine, Heroin, Morphine and Opium, these words were baked in black letters in script reminiscent of Edward Gorey's pen on ivory white coffee mugs.    I believe she picked first and took Heroin.  I took to the best of my recollection Opium.  Having your boss give she a cup with a scheduled drug emblazoned on it was not so strange in the 1970s.   Now if an employer were to do that, especially an employer of teens, he would probably be facing charges.

Uncle Philsy was no fool.  The cups were a clever ploy on his part to keep his costs down and his profits up.   The rule was that you could eat all she wanted of anything in the store, except for individually wrapped novelty items, but you had to use your assigned cup.   Paper cups were counted as inventory control and thus were not to be used.   To a teenager these initially seemed like heaven.  The promise of milkshakes and ice cream, nuts and syrup; what a deal this was.    Mr. B. as we called him knew what he was doing, cagey and crafty man that he was.  A mere two days of gorging on milk fat rich treats would devastate even the hardiest of youthful GI systems.    Explosive diarrhea, vicious cramps and gas pains so strong they would double you over were the inevitable, the near certain results of such gorging.   The nausea and the pain were memories that would seem to last a life time, but surely they would last a summer.  As a result the ice cream and treats were safe.  We ate sparingly.

Standing there petite and beautiful, she held her cup, Heroin.  She had the vibrancy and radiance of youthful beauty, but the word in her hand was the hardest of the hard.   Little didn't I realize that the cup she held was a metaphor for what she would become to me.

My memory now is that encounter with her was visceral, sensual, and electric.  Her long brown hair, curly from the humidity, was bouncing in the cooling breeze from off the Atlantic's waters.   Her skin tight jeans clung to her shapely ass.  And as always she wore those clingy rippled sort of tube tops, mostly in earth tones that barely concealed her breasts.   But it was the bandana and the glasses that I remember most despite what the first part of this paragraph might imply.

With her hair pulled back and with those aviator style glass frames, her face's beauty was clear, her smooth skin tanned and brown and those full lips captured my eye.   And the things that rolled off her tongue, the way she said them, just amazed me.  Her glasses and hair gave her a look of constant forward motion.   Her whole facial countenance seemed to imply a life being lived with a vibrant spark.   She may have been conveyed by a motorcycle, an open cockpit plane or a surfboard, but her trajectory was always forward and fast and wonder filled.