Confessions of a Hippie: Always Searching for Love

Other Books by The Author

Love and Loathing in the Islands, Searching for Gauguin

Love and Redemption in the Tropics, Missing Gauguin

CONFESSIONS

OF A

HIPPIE

ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR LOVE

ADRIANA BARDOLINO

CONFESSIONS OF A HIPPIE

ALWAYS SEARCH ING FOR LOVE

Copyright © 2021 Adriana Bardolino.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-1359-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1361-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1360-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020925766

iUniverse rev. date: 04/08/2024

We do not all walk along the same path in life, but life itself can be the path.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1  THE DISCOVERY

Chapter 2  THE OFFICIAL SUMMER OF LOVE, 1967

Chapter 3  FEAST OF THE SEVEN FISHES

Chapter 4  SURVIVAL BREAD

Chapter 5  THE TREE WAS ALIVE, LIKE ME

Chapter 6  AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

Chapter 7  THE ZOFIA LODGE

Chapter 8  THE YELLOW HOUSE

Chapter 9  THE BEST-LAID PLANS DISRUPTED

Chapter 10  GOING TO CALIFORNIA-AGAIN

Chapter 11  BACK IN THE FOLD

Chapter 12  THE RIVER

Chapter 13  THE HOUSE OF EL CAPITAN MORALES

Chapter 14  INDEPENDENT WOMEN

Chapter 15  MAKING LOVE IN A MEMORY

Chapter 16  A FORCE OF NATURE

Chapter 17  WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE AT DEER CREEK

Chapter 18  STORMY’S PUB

Chapter 19  A COSMIC JOKE

Chapter 20  VISIONS OF GAUGUIN

PREFACE

T he main story of this book focuses on an eight-year period in my life, 1967 to 1975, when I was in my twenties. I kept journals that have great detail of my experiences and my feelings. After my mother passed away, I found the journals and the letters that I had written to her during those years, which she had kept. I am not sure what her motivation was in saving them, but I am thankful she did. Reading through my letters and journals was a roller coaster ride of emotions—a lot of laughter and a lot of t ears.

During that time, the Vietnam War was still raging, although it was nearing its end. The war began in 1955 and ended in 1975 amid huge protests. The country was divided, and it was a time of upheaval and unrest. A counterculture developed, where the catch-phrase Turn on, tune in, and drop out, made famous by Timothy Leary, was adopted by many people, myself included.

A love movement was going on and something called Flower Power, which was displayed sometimes at antiwar demonstrations by hippies giving a flower to a soldier holding a gun. It was also the beginning of the free-speech movement, which began in Berkeley, California, where I was living in the late sixties. Free love was a general practice, and the word freedom was in the lyrics of many songs that were popular at the time. It was a time when psychedelic drugs were the rage, which drove people toward introspection, questioning society’s norms, and the meaning of life itself.

My journals include poems I’d written, watercolors, and drawings. I jotted down excerpts from books I was reading and described dreams I had. I copied lyrics of songs with words that expressed what I was feeling, perhaps better than I could express them myself. Some paragraphs in this book are directly from the entries in my journals. I have thousands of photographs and slides—some are black-and-white photos I developed myself when I had my own darkroom. In fact, when I discovered I’d written very few journal entries in 1969, I was able to fill in the blanks with my letters, photos, and slides, which were stamped with dates. I found letters from friends glued in the pages, and there were drawings and passages they had entered themselves. Of course, I also had my memories.

When I began reading through my letters and putting them together with the journals of corresponding years, I found an outline I’d written for this book, which was almost exactly the same as the outline I had just jotted down. At some point, many years ago, I guess I had attempted to write this book, but life got in the way. After I retired I had plenty of time to delve into the project.

I want to confess that I fell in love with the characters in my life all over again. I was tossed into the past in such a way that I felt love, anger, happiness, hurt, and depression, just as if it was happening now. Some of the people in the book are dead now, and some are still friends today. Names have been changed, but I imagine that those who experienced these years with me will know who they are. I ask them to remember that these were my experiences and feelings, and may not have been theirs.

Siri and Alexa became my assistants with dates and places of events from those years. I also had help from friends who read my original drafts of chapters. A few of the main people, who experienced a great deal of this right along with me, contributed their memories and stories. We are all tied together by the experiences we shared.

There was so much more, and so many more people I could have included. I attempted to limit the story to concentrate on the events, the people, and the relationships that were the most important to me during that time in my life. I would ask readers to keep in mind that I recorded these experiences when I was in my twenties; it was how I perceived the world, the people around me, and love itself. For me it was a time of innocence, hope, mysticism, and idealism. Of course my youth played a big role.

I hope that readers can relate to my story written from a woman’s perspective. Those who are too young to be familiar with that era will learn something about that time, and about some of the young people who lived in it. All in all, writing this book was a joyful process, and I loved every minute of it. Looking back, it was certainly a wild and beautiful ride.

I t was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. A group of us dropped LSD and walked across the road to the st ream.

I lay nude on a large, flat rock running my hand through the rippling water, peacefully listening to it gurgle past me over pebbles and branches. A soft breeze rushed past my body raising the hairs on my arms and legs.

It’s hard to explain the euphoric place I went to on the psychedelic drug. We stared at each other’s faces as if we knew a profound secret that no one else knew. He stared down at me as if he was seeing into my third eye. Then he began painting my body. I wasn’t aware that different rocks created different colors. It was spiritual at first, but soon became erotic.

Hours went by. As the sun was setting it cooled down quite a bit. We got dressed and drifted back to the house and congregated in the living room. Music seemed to be in order. Someone put an LP of the Edwin Hawkins Singers on the stereo, and we began dancing wildly to Oh Happy Day. We formed a circle and locked arms swaying together as one body, the differences between us disappearing.

It had been a glorious day, followed by a glorious night. There were many days and nights like that that summer.

ONE

THE DISCOVERY

Secret Love by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster

Just like in the song I was hiding a secret, a secret love. I held the secret for many years until one day it was set free

I t was October 1995. I was visiting my mother in the Bronx. It was her birthday, and we were planning all the things we wanted to do while I was there. She recently had spent three months with me in Hawaii, where I had been living for a long time. We were discussing the possibly of her moving there permanently wit h me.

She had called me about a month back, telling me that she wasn’t feeling well.

I had only been in the Bronx a few days when she had a stroke and was hospitalized. After five depressing and grueling weeks, during which my mother slowly deteriorated, she passed away.

I received the phone call from the hospital informing me that my mother had died. I rushed there, wanting to see her one last time, as if I could catch her spirit before it left her body. I touched her face and neck which were still warm. I hugged her and cried. I kissed her goodbye and stroked her face. I sat on a chair next to her bed for a while. She had such a peaceful look on her face, despite what she had been through over the past weeks.

Eventually I got up and touched her lifeless body again. I turned to her and said, I’ll see you on the other side. I closed the curtain around her bed and walked to the nurses’ station. I thanked them for all the attention they’d given my mother, and I left the hospital. I walked to the bus stop in a daze.

The next week was filled with funeral arrangements and calling family members, which I seemed to get through like a robot whose wires had been short circuited. I am an only child, and my father had died less than two years earlier. I went through my mother’s dresser drawers and observed how neatly her undergarments were placed, and how orderly her clothes were hung in the closets. It was almost as if she expected someone would be going through them. Just a few days before her stroke she had shown me a dress she had set aside for her funeral, which I thought was weird.

She had said, Adriana, I don’t want anyone to see my feet. I want a half-opened casket.

I turned to her with a frown and said, "Ma, what are you saying? She didn’t answer me. Perhaps she’d had a premonition.

It took three months to go through the apartment where my parents had lived for thirty-two years. I found crazy things in the closets—Styrofoam heads with wigs, a gas mask, and boxes of fabric she had saved for me from her dress factory. The fabric was so old it disintegrated as soon as I touched it.

In the closets I found tissues crumpled up in the pockets of jackets with her jewelry. On a shelf at the top of one of the closets was my father’s accordion. There were shoeboxes filled with family photos. Looking through the liquor cabinet, I found six bottles of twenty-five-year Ambassador Scotch. I immediately called my mother’s youngest sister, Camille, who loved scotch. She came to the apartment, and we marveled at the fact that by then, it was probably fifty-year Ambassador Scotch. She took all six bottles home.

I opened a large drawer at the bottom of the dresser. It was filled with all my parents’ important papers. I found a certificate from Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, where all three of their cats had been buried in tiny little coffins. I opened a large manila envelope and found it filled with all the birthday cards I had ever sent my mother, as well the baby cards my parents had given to me as a small child. My mother saved everything!

Then, there it was—I noticed a stack of letters held together with a rubber band. For a moment I thought that maybe they were love letters. I looked at the return address of the letter on the top. It was the address of the first commune I lived in, on Charming Way in Berkeley, from 1967 to 1968. I thought, what the—? I took the rubber band off and fished through them. At the back were some letters from Colombia, South America, where a group of us from the commune had spent the entire three months of the summer of 1971. Memories flooded my brain. Why would she save these letters? I began to cry uncontrollably as my emotions finally caught up with me—emotions I had been holding in over the past weeks.

As I began going through the letters, I remembered that I had journals somewhere. I rummaged through piles of paperwork in the drawer and found them. There were nine journals, all different-sized notebooks in various colors, all tied together with a ribbon.

I sat down on the floor in my parents’ bedroom and untied the ribbon. For a moment I forgot where I was, and delved into what was in my hands. I was thrown back into the past and thought of the years I’d lived with a group of people—my years of communal living. I opened the first journal and flipped through the pages. There were drawings, poems I’d written, watercolors, excerpts from books I was reading, and there were pages of text about my experiences and feelings. I began reading one of the entries from Berkeley 1969:

This music has so much soul. The guy standing next to me knows it’s good. His wispy brown hair swaying to the music, and his feet are stomping. Soon, he takes off his glasses. I turn to look at this man beside me. His soft, sensual, and exciting face is smiling at me. Then he becomes very intent. I look again, and he is just a boy. He takes my hand tightly in his. His hands are cold. He is enjoying watching me groove to the music. He tells me he is tired and wants to leave. I am thinking he wants something else.

I put the journal down and thought, this was not my boyfriend, Noah Bernstein. Who was it? I was interested but reluctant to read further, wondering what I would rediscover about myself and my past. I had so much packing to do, so I took the letters and journals and placed them in a box on top of the important family documents.

My parents’ old apartment was filled with so many memories that flooded back to me over the three months I was there. I couldn’t help but reminisce about my family and growing up in the Bronx. I decided to sleep in my parents’ bed. It made me feel close to them, and in a strange way it gave me comfort.

The next day I called my oldest childhood friend, Robby Noble. Robby and his brother, Joshua, lived upstairs on the second floor of the four-family house I grew up in. We played together on the streets, and shared each other’s holidays. Joshua had a weight problem, and his mother put a lock on their refrigerator. I never knew anyone else who did anything like that.

Robby and I talked on the phone for a long time. His mother was still alive, and I told him that was a blessing. As we were talking I pictured the lilac bush that was outside the window of my parents’ bedroom in that first house. It had the most wonderful aroma that would drift in on the breeze in the spring. In summer, when it was unbearably hot inside those apartments, our neighbors would bring beach chairs out onto the street, and we’d all sleep outside. There was no air conditioning in those early days.

Packing up my elementary school class photos, I noticed that my mother had saved my report cards. I remembered her being called to school because I was caught passing a book around with my girlfriends—Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. Another time, it was for writing a racy letter about a boy we all liked. Someone gave the letter to the teacher, and she read it out loud to the class.

My mother always had a frown on her face when she read Defies authority on my report cards. In first grade she came to school for Parent’s Day. My teacher held up my finger painting and told my mother I was going to be an artist.

I took a break from packing, made myself dinner, went into the living room and sat on the couch to eat. The couch was where I slept when I visited my parents. I walked to the box with my journals and took out the same notebook from Berkeley that I’d been reading.

The sun’s lost some of its bottom, and it looks like a Chinese lantern. It’s lighting up a room for someone. Maybe Dean’s room, red and warm. I can see fir trees swaying on a cliff in the distance. It’s going to be a foggy night. I really can’t live just in the now, because I’m all of those things that happened before. It’s all me. Everything I’ve ever felt, everyone I’ve ever loved, and all I’ve ever done. I’m all that and more. I try to be in the now, now, now. The sun has disappeared. But it’s somewhere else, for someone else.

After reading that, it was obvious who the first journal entry was about. I looked around me, and the apartment seemed so empty—my family gone and our memories being packed away. All my artwork, which my mother had framed, hung everywhere around the apartment. Funny, I thought, because she never really praised my work when I was younger.

The day I was born the doctor told my mother she’d drawn her own picture. She was thirty-one at the time and as beautiful as a movie star. Her hair was brown, like mine, but she always dyed it red, like that popular actress, Rita Hayworth. Her name was Vita, which means life in Italian. My mother was full of life, and everyone loved her. I carefully packed her photo away.

Vita owned a dress factory in the Bronx with her brother, Victor. I spent a lot of time there as a child. I learned how to sew on those fast and powerful industrial machines. Sometimes we stayed late into the night, setting up bundles of dress parts for the operators for the following day. Occasionally two rats would appear at the end of the cutting table, which ran almost the entire length of the factory. These little creatures were not fazed by us at all. My mother named them Tom and Jerry, after the popular cartoon. They were as large as rabbits and were very cute. They had been displaced when the adjacent lot next to the factory was turned over to build a gas station. I remember inviting the neighborhood kids into the factory after hours to watch the rats run over my feet. The kids squealed with joy and horror. I wasn’t afraid. I knew they wouldn’t bite me; they never did.

My mother was a very independent woman, and I think it rubbed off on me. Most of her siblings were born in Bari, Italy, but she was born in the Harlem section of New York City. I drove by that house a few times with my cousin Giovanna, whose mother had grown up there with mine. They told us spooky tales about a ghost in that house. Giovanna Ferrari, Gia for short, was like a sister to me. Our mothers were sisters and always together. They even dressed us like twins when we were children.

I looked down at a gem I had found in one of my mother’s jacket pockets. It was her sapphire ring, a large center stone with diamonds around it. Gia was on her way over to the apartment to give me the certificate for the cemetery. Sapphire was Gia’s birthstone, so I gave the ring to her. Our parents, who were to be buried together, purchased a plot in Woodlawn Cemetery when Gia’s father, Faustino, died a fairly young man. My aunt Porciella was still alive, thank God. Gia handed me the certificate, and we held each other and cried. When she left I felt depressed. I walked to the box with all my journals, which by now had become a habit. I picked out one from 1972.

Bodies of splendor. Nude, strong, and shining in the sun. Beads of water trickling over hair and breasts. They painted my body with earth-tone colors of brown, yellow, and green. It felt holy yet sensuous. I felt like an ancient queen being decorated with spit and rock. I swam out into the water to rinse the paint off, and he followed me in. The paint wouldn’t come off so we kissed under the surface, and it sealed the bond. We swam to shore together. It’s a beginning. It’s new. Yet it’s ancient.

I needed another drink after reading that. The memory of that day flooded back to me.

My father once told me that his life began the day I was born. He was forty years old at the time. My mother told me I was the apple of his eye. My father, Andrea, had come to America from Sicily when he was ten years old. His family were sharecroppers in the old country. Andrea told me he slept in a barn and would be woken up by rats running under him through the hay. My father called me Cookie—well, all Italian girls are called Cookie—being a sweet young thing. I was definitely Daddy’s little girl. My mother never took me anywhere, but my father took me everywhere.

Andrea learned barbering and eventually got his own shop. The barbershop was another place I spent a lot of time while growing up. I’d swing around on the barber chairs until I was dizzy. I loved watching my father cutting the guys’ hair in the newest styles of the day—the DA (Duck’s Ass) and the flattop. When I was a teenager, my father kept my high school photo on the cash register. If a guy would stare at it too long he’d say, Don’t get any ideas. She’s my daughter! There was no hope of my ever meeting a guy in the barbershop! I chuckled at the sweet memory.

I carefully packed my father’s shaving kit. I was sure that the straight razor and brush were antiques. I walked to the liquor cabinet to make myself a drink. I was hoping the drink wouldn’t prompt emotions and tears. Of course, I rummaged through the box and picked out another journal. I flipped through the pages and came across a poem I’d written:

New Year’s Eve

Blissful thoughts of times gone by

Streamers, horns, and lovers kissing with stars in their eyes

A new year dawns with only a hint of the past

Yesterday’s gone but for the memories that last

I took another long sip of my drink and lay on the couch feeling the effects of the alcohol. I thought of the gas mask I had put in the pile for the Goodwill, and began to laugh. I wondered how I’d ever grown up normal—or had I?

My father had a phobia—that’s what everyone called it. He had a sensitivity to gas fumes and odors in general, perhaps resulting from two operations he had on his nose as a young man. He told us he smelled gas fumes in our home, insisting that it was killing us, but we didn’t know it. True, there was a gas boiler in the basement of the building, but it didn’t affect anyone but him. He suffered actual physical symptoms—nausea and headaches. He even wore a gas mask in the house at one time. My mother persuaded him to see a psychiatrist, but after his appointment he told us that he was sane, and the psychiatrist was crazy.

This called for an exorcism, Italian-style. My cousin Ariel was married to Bruno whose mother was born with Veronica’s veil (also called a caul). This is when a baby is born with the amniotic sac covering (or partly covering) it. The Italians believe such people possess special powers. This woman kept part of the placenta from her birth, and wore it in a pouch around her neck. My mother summoned her to our house, hoping the woman could rid the house of my father’s scourge.

She came into the living room as we all stood around in a circle, waiting to see what would happen. At some point, her expression changed, and she began pacing around the room like a woman in a trance, touching things and spitting into a bowl. I was just a child, but it seemed nonsensical at best. All of a sudden, she pointed to my Castro chair-bed, screaming, Whose chair is this? It throws me!

Well, everyone knew it was my chair. Perhaps she felt me resisting her. I was sure she could see it in the snarky expressions I was making. In the end, she left the house without any resolution to my father’s scourge. This Allergy, as my father called it, began to affect everything in his life, even his barbershop. He moved from one shop to another, because at each one he would eventually smell gas.

As I was packing the Italian antiques and cut-crystal champagne glasses from the forties, a train went by outside the bathroom window rattling everything in the china cabinet. I stopped and thought, I never noticed that when I lived here. I walked to the box that held my journals and took out a blue one from 1970. I sat at the dining room table and began to read:

I haven’t written out of my head for a while. There has been so much living and loving done this summer. We swam in streams, played on mountains, and made love everywhere. The man I am in love with is beautiful, but I wonder where his head is at right now. Something is not there anymore. Maybe it’s all in my head. I want to see him standing there in his overalls again. It was all right there, in that moment, and I felt it. I don’t feel it from him anymore, and it makes me sad. We were friends, lovers, and partners. We’re due for a trip out west, and I wonder what changes will evolve. I’m not even sure I should go with him. Maybe it will be like Siddhartha’s river. Constantly flowing and changing but still the same river.

After reading that, those emotions came back to me. I remembered how I’d felt writing that passage so many years ago. I knew who it was about, and I felt loss all over again.

I was also dealing with a lifetime of guilt. A woman named Filomena Genoa had taken care of me since I was six months old, from the very beginning. My mother was a busy woman with a business to run, so she found someone to take care of me during the day. Filomena lived in a five-floor walk-up across the street from my mother’s dress factory. She had the most striking blue eyes. She was a wonderful woman, and was like a mother to me. In fact, I imagined she was my real mother, and that Vita, my real mother, had adopted me. There was a popular song at that time called Secret Love sung by Jerry Vale. Whenever I heard that song, I thought of the secret love I hid inside of me for Filomena. I couldn’t tell my family or my friends; they wouldn’t understand.

When I was in elementary school, Filomena would pick me up after class and take me to her house, where I remained until my mother closed the factory and would come to pick me up. My fantasy about Filomena being my real mother came to a head one day when my mother closed the factory early, and showed up at school to pick me up. I was annoyed and threw a temper tantrum. I yelled at her, You’re not my mother! Filomena’s my real mother! My mother was very upset and began crying. She grabbed my arm and took me to Filomena’s apartment. We walked up the five flights of stairs. Filomena was surprised to see us.

They sat me on a chair, and Filomena straightened me out to the facts, gently but firmly. She said, Adriana, I love you—you know that—but I’m not your mother. You know that honey; don’t you?

I was crying, but nodded my head. I accepted the truth, but I didn’t like it. After all, I couldn’t help how distant I felt from my own mother. I was a confused kid with a very vivid imagination. I eventually woke up to reality—although I was emotionally numb for a long time.

I still felt guilt, even after all these years had passed. After seeing all the things my mother saved, I realized just how much she loved me. She once looked at me and said, You’re my life! I hadn’t understood back then.

Liquor was getting me through this rough time. I walked to the cabinet and made myself a Tanqueray and tonic. I reached in the box of journals and took out one from 1971.

We danced all night in that café in Cali. We were high on tequila and high on life. I think I’m in love. The night was so hot and humid. I felt as if I was living in a movie. This Bolivian revolutionary swept me off my feet, and I don’t know how I will ever come back to earth. Here in South America, the line between fantasy and reality is getting blurred. The way he looked at me and held me. I couldn’t wait until we were back in the hotel room.

I walked back to the liquor cabinet and made myself another drink. I took out a different journal, a yellow one. I sat on the couch, put my feet up, and began reading.

Mescaline … Runnin’ ’round my brain. It was all so beautiful. But it wasn’t the drug; it was the people and the vibes. Bodies draped over each other, warm, swaying, some nude. Souls melting into each other, dripping off chairs and flowing onto the floor. It felt warm, felt high. Lots of beauty and love floating between us.

The journal entries were drawing me further into my past, and I was feeling at home in the pages.

The next day I went to the bank to close Vita’s accounts and empty the safe deposit box. Among the birth certificates in the box, I found my baby jewelry, and my graduation ring from the High School of Art and Design. At some point, when I was younger, I’d told my mother I didn’t want the ring anymore. I was so happy she’d saved it for me. I slipped it on my pinky finger, which is where it fit me now. I had always planned on attending my district high school, Henry Hudson, in the Bronx, but my mother enrolled me in the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. That art school orbited me into a different world. I wonder if my life would have been different if I’d gone to my district school and stayed close to my childhood friends.

The trip to the safe deposit box, and my high school ring, caused a flashback of my first serious boyfriend, Jamie Fitzpatrick. We dated for a few years, and I wondered whatever had happened to him. Jamie Fitzpatrick was everything parents could want for their daughter—but I was so young, perhaps fifteen. Jamie’s father was Irish, and his mother was Polish. He was very tall—six foot four—with blond hair cut in an Elvis-style— with locks of hair cascading down his forehead. He was very handsome, in a classic James Stewart way. My parents took us to the Roseland Dance Hall in New York City, where they had met. A woman passed Jamie, staring at him longingly. My mother squeezed my arm and remarked, That woman almost melted when she saw Jamie. He was beautiful to look at, and I was definitely smitten.

At that time however, my life was going through changes, and I didn’t see that at the beginning. Jamie wanted to get engaged, but my parents were dead set against it. My mother said, Adriana, you’re too young to be thinking about marriage. Of course, the more my parents were against it, the more I wanted it. So, at seventeen years of age, I was engaged to Jamie Fitzpatrick.

That same year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I sat on the couch in our living room, watching the state funeral on our new color TV. I couldn’t help crying as I watched the president’s little son saluting his father’s casket as it went by in the motorcade. Jamie didn’t share my political sympathies, which was one of the things that drove a wedge between us. There were riots that summer in some of the major cities, and the country was in turmoil. The National Guard was called up to keep the peace.

But politics wasn’t the only thing on which Jamie and I differed. I was an artist, and he was what we called straitlaced at the time. My mother bought me a guitar for my birthday, and sent me for guitar lessons. Jamie remarked, What are you—a hippie now?

Jamie enlisted in the National Guard to avoid the draft. I enrolled in The Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan majoring in fashion design and illustration. The two year college was filled with fashion shows, French lessons, ad illustration, and garment construction. The instructor of the pattern making class, Mr. Whittaker, was a funny little man. He was heavy set, wore a bow tie, and was subject to frequent nose bleeds. Everyone snickered behind his back while he dabbed the blood with a perfumed handkerchief. I liked him because he claimed I was ambidextrous.

My entire family loved Jamie, and at the beginning so did I. In fashion school my life was changing rapidly. Within a few weeks of his being gone in the National Guard, I fell out of love with Jamie Fitzpatrick, and in love with Zachary Darcy. I didn’t tell anyone, and I especially didn’t want my mother to know that she was right all along. Jamie was at Fort Dix when I wrote him a Dear John letter.

Zachary Darcy was a jazz musician, a drummer. I had gone to Latin Night at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village with my best friend Salina to see Tito Puente. Salina Rivera was Puerto Rican, and we often went together to hear Latin music. On that night, we got friendly with the two guys who were sitting at our table. Zack was tall with a solid build and curly blond hair. He had a boyish face with dimples when he smiled. He looked like Donovan, the Scottish folk singer whose songs I liked to