Enjoy Chapters 3 & 4 of “American Girl” – the memoirs of Roxanne Fontana-Treiber  ..  (to be available soon?)

Chapter 3
 
"Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth..."
-David Bowie 'Rock n' Roll Suicide'

Even with my amazing 'female intuition' of which I was just beginning to become aware, I had no idea just how strange a place 'Elmont' was, none at all. There was a strange couple that lived next door, my parents' age perhaps a bit older, they were very quiet and very nosy, next to them was a couple the same age but they seemed a bit more friendly and normal. Across the street was an Irish-American family, the Keyes, and they had a daughter that seemed to be between my age, and my sisters, and a son that seemed to be more near my age. He'd be the closest person that could become a friend but my Father's Italian, over-protective, dirty-minded weirdness was starting to reveal itself and I was to have nothing to do with this boy; Pete,I wouldn't even be able to say his name!

The biggest mystery was across the street from us slightly to the left.  This was an old school house from the early 1900's and it sure did look it.  It was built out of a worn ochre and brown stone and it was of a most peculiar shape and height and therein lived a family of eight very filthy, dirty people. Parents, who turned out to be first cousins, from Alabama, and their six slightly retarded children, adding to the horror of it all was the fact that there were trees around that never seemed to be green, and the rest of the ground was dirt. Not even crab grass, just dirt. The house was rented to them by an elderly woman who lived there before, and had moved out just before we moved in. She wore nothing but black with long black sleeves even in the Summertime, had white albino type skin, and white hair and her car was a hearse, no kidding. The town also had strange sounding names for streets, "Blackstone Street", "Holland Avenue", "Dutch Broadway." For a child with a dramatic and sometimes cryptic imagination who was used to numbers and letters I suppose the seeds of 'art' were sown.

Uncle Frank lived two blocks away on Gotham Avenue, and Uncle John eight blocks away on Holland Avenue. Also my two aunts and grandparents were living across the street. Elmont was broken up into sections, and our section was called 'Gotham Manor' - something out of Batman the popular TV show at the time, I thought. As a consequence of our whole family not really knowing anyone outside of the two related families in the neighborhood, we got much more insulated and involved in our family and family matters. This was not a good thing really. The only joy for me at this time was having my own bedroom, I could shut the door when my parents fought and even pretend that it was my own apartment, my own world. I picked out a great furniture set with my parents of white painted wood trimmed in the yellowest of yellow, and my room was the same shade of bright deep-yellow as the furniture trim, and the dresser had very 'mod' silver pulls and a large silver framed mirror to match. I put my little record player on my desk and dreamed. Some day I would have a proper record player, and all the Beatles albums and maybe even some albums by some other groups. The only link I had with the world was my father's daily newspapers though and the stories about the Beatles splitting up and taking each other to court put me into a major depression. It couldn't have come at a worse time for me as I was so lonely in this new house, with no friends.

We moved to Elmont in November 1970 and it was strange how without even trying and without 'having a life', I was almost Zeitgeist-like even at age 11. It was a time for our society when the bloom was off the rose.  The only thing raging on from out of a gloriously exciting past few years was the war. The hip people went underground and wouldn't be presenting themselves with smiles and flowers and brightness, but they were to vanish and all that would remain of any 'counter culture' was apparently a ripped blue-jeaned and dirty small army of dying souls. The "vibe" wasn't about LSD or even 'speed' but heroin. The portrayals of modern life were also more in line with the environment I now found myself, movies like Go Ask Alice, Maybe I'll Be Home In The Spring, and other suburban drug movies would soon become enjoyably watched tv movies of parents and my friends to be. So here we were, the Fontanas, moving from the excitement of Brooklyn and the 60's,to some suburban, quiet, cemetery filled, thus mysterious town called Elmont, for the downer-hippie early 70's. The kids in my class were nothing like what I was used to. They didn't dress in fashion at all, didn't wear there hair in fashionable styles and didn't fist fight. They gossiped and plotted and would shut you out and resent you. This was not my scene at all. Had it not been for the fact that I had cousins there that were older, and my cousin Jerry my age that they 'knew' about, and that I was Italian, and lastly that I wasn't 'ugly', I would have had a really hard time. I could tell they would really want to give it to me psychologically, (the new girl with the fashion sense from Brooklyn), but I was saved by these three factors. I was really a fish out of water with this sort of thinking from kids my own age who didn't buy records, but were truly the product of middle class parents paying very close attention to their kids.
            It seems the first thing we did outside of paint and move in was to cut down the huge Weeping Willow tree which must have been about 80 years old that was the center piece of our very large back yard. My father was absolutely sure he wanted to and had to cut it down. If not it could perhaps "fall on the house", so he said, or understandably, the leaves were a pain in the ass to sweep because of their shape and they could get into the leders of the house and we'd have major problems. My mother who never could make up her mind about anything would be for it completely and even nag my father about getting it done, then at other times she'd put her head to one side as if to feel sorry for the beautiful old tree. As for me and my hippie leanings I was not for cutting down this tree, but I was seduced into going along when I thought of how much of the sunny sky would be seen and we could sun bathe in our backyard. My sister as usual had no opinion of her own and would just go with whatever

Mommy and Daddy say.  

According to the writings of historian scholar Robert Ranke Graves the Willow Tree governs the time period of April 15-May 12 and is historically known as the The Tree of Enchantment. This time period would be ruling my 5th astrological house natally, the house that governs child bearing and all forms of creativity, and romance. The Willow tree is sacred to several Underworld goddesses - among them Persephone, Circe, Hera and one that I would grow particularly fond of in the late 70's Hekate, Mother of Witches. In Greek mythology the "willow-branch" was synonymous with the mythic mountain home of the Nine Muses, the enchanted inspiration for all the arts and sciences. In Culpeper's Complete Herbal, he says of the Willow, "The Moon owns it," because the moon controls moisture and tides, and Willow is "the tree that loves water most." The words "witch," "wicked" and "wicker" are all derived from the ancient word for Willow.  Druidic human sacrifices were offered at the full moon in wicker-baskets.  The leaves and bark of the tree produce salicylic acid, an ingredient used in the best dandruff shampoos. According to more modern lore it symbolized grief over unrequited love, or the loss of a lover, yet according to the ancient Song of the Forest Trees, "Burn not the Willow, a tree sacred to poets, receiving the gift of mystic eloquence by touching willow trees in a grove of Persephone." Finally, it has been researched that the custom of carrying sallow-willow branches on Palm Sunday, was originally a celebration at the start of the Willow -month, during April.  So, there before the start of our first Wintertime in Elmont as the Scorpio sun was opposite the sun that rules the Willow tree, the loud chainsaws cut into the silence and then into the beautiful Weeping Willow, as the new moon born, future poet and songwriter and occultist and witch and dehydrated, dandruff -ridden head -scratching muse of a few great men, and further into the future, mystic christian, sat, listening to the chainsaws, and dreaming, in the bright yellow room. The equal blessings, and curse, of the tree were upon me. Being aware of all these things at the time would of course have only made me 'worse' as I had been such a drama queen with goth and mystical leanings ever since the fairies in the ground at Staten Island. But no, to me the tree only meant that we'd have more sun in the yard and it would make the yard seem bigger. I knew that 'hippies' would probably disapprove and maybe they were right, and I should feel bad about this, which I did, a little. All that was left was a stump about two feet high, and the thick heavy rounded roots could still be felt of course close to the surface of the grass all around it for many feet and going under the house in a real creepy kind of way. Looking back on it now with what I've learned it was also a sort of metaphysical marriage of the sun (male) and the moon (female). The tree was the moon and I was the moon, not only being female but being born on the new moon, and there I wanted to cut it down to expose the sun, which rules manifestation and also the male. It was a marriage and it was a sacrifice as well, and what the tree had shaded and what the sun would now shine on was the foot and half high cement patio that ran the long way across the house which I always thought was the 'perfect stage', the perfect size. A good night club size.

The first Wintertime in Elmont was a bit lonely and I found that living in a house could be a dangerous thing as my parents could fight as loud as they wanted to and wouldn't have to be afraid of neighbors right beyond a wall. In the years that came it would prove to be a very good reason to have not left Brooklyn. The only friend I had was a girl that lived up the block named Jodi McArdle. She was very pretty and that attracted me. Since I was a young girl I was always very attracted to beautiful women, but not in a lesbian way of any kind at all. If there was a woman or a girl, who had something special about her, like confidence, and good looks that resembled mine, I would be very drawn to it, yet it didn't mean ever that I wanted to get involved with them on a sexual level or even a kiss, no, that thought has always to this day disgusted me. I guess I am a narcissist. I wanted to emulate and be a beautiful woman.

When I was a child the first women that attracted me were Ann Margaret, and the Beatles girlfriends, actress Jane Asher, and model Pattie Boyd. Jodi had silky blonde hair and big round blue eyes and an over developed chest for a girl so young, and a tendency to talk about boys alot. Together we shared our first cigarettes: her grandmother's filterless Pall Mall's. We choked, we got dizzy, we got to feeling sick, and concluded that smoking would definitely not be for us, so we thought. We also shared a great love for the Beatles. She had an original Beatles tray from 1964, and what for her was a fondness for the group turned into a full blown obsession thanks to my prodding and almost religious fervour towards the group and the music. We wrote down by hand what we thought the lyrics were so we could sing along. We got a hold of a few full albums which for me was an amazing thing as I had only had the singles which I bought, the first album that my father bought, then a greatest hits bootleg that my father found somewhere, and finally for our last Christmas in Brooklyn I'd gotten the biblical Abbey Road album. It was time to go back though, and discover album tracks that I'd never known, which is how I spent the time that I wasn't in that dreadful Gotham Avenue school where the others would look at me sideways when I wasn't looking, and would secretly and sometimes not so secretly notice my weak point, which was that I wasn't a "jock". A term I never even heard of in Brooklyn. This did not wash as the school favorite was a smiling kind black gym teacher loved by all, Mr. Franklin. He was a teacher that made even hip kids prone to sports. It was a moot point with me. I just wanted to hurry up and grow up and be cool and pretty and fantastically dressed and date and marry a handsome famous musician like Paul McCartney, or even more handsome, Dino Danelli. I had no time for this! Running and jumping and marking your place in the dirt, and climbing a rope to the high ceiling, was not the way I measured what was cool! A lot of long and dark time would pass though before I'd get to be a grown up, and I didn't know that it wasn't going to be fun, at all.

My parents moved to Elmont for two reasons, one that it was close to some other Fontanas, and two because it would be a better, safer place to raise their kids in these confusing times. Had they done their research they would have found that at that time the highest drug abuse rate in the entire country's high schools were found in New York, on Long Island, in District 2 which consisted of 3 High Schools, and the Kingpin drug High School was the school I'd be going to start in a few months, which was a combination Junior High School and High School together called Elmont Memorial High School. No one has ever explained the 'Memorial' and it has been joked that it was a curse. A number of kids have died going to the school and people have had their lives cut short prematurely till today who have gone to that school. As Elmont was known and famous for two things, and still is, the many cemeteries, including one affluent Jewish one where Andy Kaufman is buried as well as other famed Jews, and it's known for its beautiful Belmont Park Racetrack, we figured the 'Memorial' in the name might have had something to do with the fact that it is a cemetery town.  Which actually makes for some very clean air, on the positive side.

The thought of spending six years in a row doing the same thing going to the same place was scary to me actually, even before I started.  What if I didn't like it? What if I hated it? Six years?? To the same school? We had bought this house so it didn't seem likely we'd move. I thought optimistically though that it would have to be better than the Gotham grammar school simply because it was so big. So there I could be anonymous as the years hurried up and got over with and I got through school. I thought it wouldn't be clique-y necessarily, and I could study properly and act grown up and hopefully there wouldn't be this childishness relating to sport activities. But I was wrong. I was wrong on all those counts. It was clique-y, everybody knew everybody else, people were picked on, and the LaCrosse and Football teams were the thing to do and get involved in. I started to notice that girls went into the bathrooms to do more than go to the bathroom. They went in to smoke cigarettes. It was a clique-y thing to do, but it wasn't a sporty thing to do, so I felt I found my niche. There were two girls who were the scare of the whole school: Camille Stabile, and Angie Pagan. Camille, the major Queen of the School, actually lived on my block. She also had a younger brother in my grade, Phil, who was quite good looking but obviously troubled. The girls were tall, they were gorgeous, one Italian, one Puerto Rican, they had great developed but thin bodies, and they had the biggest mouths in the school.  They were all liquid eyeliner and long fingernails, and they would 'up against the wall mother fucker' even jocks their own age. They were actually from Elmont but they were so Bronx or Brooklyn! I kept my cool and kept silent but I was intrigued, and found myself scheduling my cigarettes and bathroom hangouts when they were there.  The rest of the school avoided them with fear and some girls would be nice to be  acceptable to them, but never too nice or they'd hate you. I didn't think they noticed me much except that they got used to my presence, and then before I knew it I was 'honey,' and other affectionate terms like that. Once when I was in the stall having a pee I heard them debating about which of the two of them that I was idolizing. It filled me with a slight apprehension that maybe they'd decide that they wouldn't like me, but also with a flattery that they cared who I was looking up to more! The classes and basically the school though were right out of one of the current drug movies being shown on tv, with some old out of date school teachers frustrated with their lack of footing in society circa the early 70's.  There were also young fashionable teachers who decided to not drop out and turn on but go and tell teenagers to read books about that lifestyle and do Book Reports about it. One of my favorite books to this date was 'Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me,' there were many copies of this book at my school, it was a favorite. It was the only book written by Californian hipster Richard Farina who was very into Marijuana and LSD and died in a bike accident on the way to a Los Angeles party celebrating the release of the book. Then there were other books we were given to read as well, like 'Drop out,' about brothers on drugs (of course), and the famous 'Harrad Experiment' about college kids fucking and getting high, and others. This was our reading materials to study and write about. Then there would be the endless 'song interpretation' classes. I loved this class of course as we used Beatle songs a lot, but even at age 13 1/2 I realized the world was starting to get lame when we had to interpret the Eagles 'Take It Easy.' I whined as silently as I could and rolled my eyes so frequently at the teacher I thought he'd send me to the eye doctor. I remember this wanna-be hippie, pseudo intellectual Jewish teacher in his mid-20s caused me great embarrassment one particular day. He had the whole class silent as he went on and on about some nonsense. He was like this for the entire 40 minute class 'period'. The class sat there and paid attention to him in a way much like a staring void, they listened because they had to they were trapped into it, but they weren't really listening that much at all. It just looked as though they were, maybe a few of them actually were and maybe they were considering what this jerk was saying as truth, but most of the kids were just sitting there. I knew they had the attitude of, well this teacher is really boring and annoying, but me, I was different. As each stupid affected sentence came out of his mouth my opinion of it must have been registering on more than my 'aura'. As the long bell rang through the silence of the room filled  only with his stupid voice, the class was ever so relieved to be able to leave. As he concluded loudly over the bell he ended his stream of consciousness with, "and Fontana, take your looks home to your mother." I half-faked a defensive expression but was too cool to not take advantage of being noticed to have disagreed.  With his publicly announcing it, I felt I did more to deflate his passion about whatever he was going on about, than I was embarrassed. I was pleased with myself as the kids were leaving and shot quizzical grins at me.

Because of my being initiated into the cult of sitting on the bathroom sink and smoking cigarettes, and even having Camille and Angie turn into big sister type buddies, I was introduced to Angie's younger sister Caroline Pagan, who was still older than me, by just a year. She would be my new friend, replacing Jodi who already had, and was 'allowed' to have a 'boyfriend.' Plus I had felt very guilty about convincing Jodi to pull the fire alarm at the high school. The police came and searched each room to see who would have the dreaded dayglow paint on them, and when they found Jodi with it on her she sheepishly was led away by the police, when it was all my idea.

The Pagans lived 2 blocks away from me. At this time the "Gotham crowd" was starting to form as well. Four short blocks away from me there were two small shops one a candy store, one a deli, and in the candy store, certain older teenagers would hang out there. My favorite character was a much older boy named Fleet Owens. He wore all black and it was whispered that he was on drugs. When pressed you could find out the drug was heroin.  He was good looking and I'd never seen anyone from head to toe in black except maybe Johnny Cash on the television. Why he was my favorite was because he loved music, he was the first person I'd ever seen, on tv or in person who walked around with a boom box. My fondest memory of him is him sitting on the ground in front of the stores and blaring out of his box in the greatest sound quality I ever did hear, as he rocked his whole upper body slowly back and forth was the Beatles, 'Dear Prudence.' He was one of the first of many many deaths in Elmont. When he died I was sad. I was sad that I wasn't more than someone who would just ask him for a light off his cigarette that he'd smile at. He was nice to everyone, but strangely quiet and to himself. He seemed very happy which was a striking contrast to the all black outfits and the talk of heroin. He must've been about 19 years old when someone gave him tainted dope to shoot.

One morning upon getting to school and going into homeroom an announcement came over the speaker from the main office about a horrendous car accident that had taken place the night before with a handful of seniors and 11th graders from our school. It was really horrible, they were all dead, and we were to have a moments silence for them. One of the girls was LuAnn Tavalaro, sister of one of the cute boys my age, Vinny.  The Tavalaros lived in my neighborhood, and Vinny along with his sister Karen who was a year older, and Frankie who was a grade younger, were all part of the growing candy store Gotham crowd. 

             Besides spending time with Caroline Pagan, and observing in passing the kids aroundthe candy store, I spent a lot of time at a girl's house on my street. Arlene Uzich was a year younger than me. She was one of four beautiful daughters raised by their father who you would only notice because he was an extremely charming and nice man. They were all unusual looking to me because they were dark haired with striking bone structures and very blue eyes. They were Yugoslavian. The attraction for me was that the girls loved music and had albums and so I would go over there many many days after school and me and Arlene would sit on the floor cross legged like hippies, just 'rapping' and I would love being in this sort of structure where there would be no uptight mother and father around. We would sit around and it was many a day that we would wait for her older sister to come home so she could put on Rod Stewart's 'Never a dull moment' very loud and to the first drum hit of 'True Blue' we'd all be up on our feet and we'd dance to the entire album. Another favorite of her older sisters was the live Humble Pie album. It was great to love music and be turned on to such great sounds! I thought my head would blow off and my feet would jump me to the sky and my heart and soul would burst out! One late afternoon, when I was in my yellow bedroom making cassette tapes off the FM radio which was a new thing for me and the world of 'rock music', formerly known as 'pop music', I heard a bunch of sounds that sounded like fire crackers. Only I had seemed to notice it not only because Elmont was a very quiet town, but because it was the Fall and not the time for fire crackers. Hours later when we sat down to eat dinner, my father said in a hushed sad manner, "someone shot Arlene's father down the block, right in front of the house."
            "Oh my God!" exclaimed my mother.

"I heard it!" I said.

"You didn't hear anything," my father dead-panned.

"I did! I thought it was firecrackers!"

"YOU DIDN'T HEAR ANYTHING" my father repeated sounding like a mafia boss.

Okay. We all went on about what a nice man he was, then I went into my room just as Arlene was coming down the block with Karen Tavalaro holding onto her as she was sobbing loudly. I looked out the window at her and felt so badly. I knew that Karen after losing her older sister whom she must have idolized, was the right girl for the job of comforting her and it was fate that Arlene was hanging out more and more up at the candy store and with Karen.

              One of the favorite things I used to love to do was go after school that season to a new old fashioned style soda shop called 'Tina's' on Hempstead Turnpike and Savoy Street, a few blocks from my house. I don't know which of the Gotham crowd discovered this little hot spot but it was great. It had about three comfortable big red leather booths, a real counter and a fantastic juke box. Every day Arlene, all three Tavalaros, Phil Stabile, and an effeminate Italian boy with shiny dark curly hair, Joe, complete with limp wrists, feminine walk, and flashing gold watch, would meet up there and almost try to act like adults. As the music played the Supremes 'Stone Love', the O’Jays 'Love Train', the Beatles, 'Hard Days Night' we were creating our first little social scene as adults. We were all in the 12-14 year old range but we were acting somewhat like adults, except for Frankie Tavalaro. It was there that he started his three year plus obsession of torturing me in any fashion he could think of. When I say torture I mean physical as well as mental. I was terrified of him. It wasn't until I thought of him decades later that I realized that it wasn't that he hated me for some mysterious reason, but probably that he was attracted to me. He was very good looking but I didn't care for him really and preferred his brother Vinny who I had a secret crush on but he didn't seem to be interested in me at all outside of just as a nice girl that he was kind to, like every other girl. I can still hear the voices of the others, all the others, at one time or another saying, "Frankie cut it out," "Frankie leave her alone," as I would through the years be beat up to the point just before I'd get a dark bruise. I was smeared with eggs, spit, soda, drawn on with permanent magic marker, and my favorite memory, being dragged across the entire massive front of green lawn of the Gotham Avenue grammar school in my new, very loved white straight leg jeans, by my ankles. I screamed the whole way, and he laughed the whole way, and the others just sat around, talking, smoking cigarettes and pot, and singing to the music on the radio, and when looking over at us they'd either ignore my predicament, laugh lightly or shake their heads. Back at Tina's it wasn't so bad though because we were all made to sit down in booths so it was kept somewhat civil. But for some reason after about six months no one wanted to go there anymore and preferred the outside on the corner at Gotham and the occassional dip in its candy store.

I was still however, obsessed with growing up and I kept up on what was happening in the rock world that I aspired to. I had the newspapers, which of course had 'rock columns' and I'd go to the local library where I would check out every single rock book on the shelf, current and of the past say five years going back to about 1966. Everything though seemed to be changing so quickly. It was at this time that I decided to get active and so I wrote to Lillian Roxon, a rock journalist. I wrote her a three page letter I remember, but don't remember what on earth was in it! I do remember that she wrote me back though, and that thrilled me. I liked her, her syle and most important her book, the Rock Encyclopedia, which I guess was what the letter was about. Soon after that she died and I was shocked by this. They had a bit about her in the papers, and I felt sad but 'hip' to have corresponded with her. I would tell my parents, and any of the kids who would listen, "I knew her....She knew me," I would brag.

Meanwhile the Gotham crowd was filling out to a few more people at this time, Arlene's future husband, Tommy O'Grady, Charlie Tomasetti, Big Jim Malone, Jimmy Schreifer, Tommy Catoneese, Jackie Coates, Freddy Kerwin, JoAnne and Christine Sharkey, Debbie Palagonia, Dawn Spillane, Ann Tintner, and a very interesting character who would occassionally show up, Josephine Nunziata. She was the skinniest girl I ever did see and she had Peter Fonda aviator style perscription glasses, and a shag haircut of gorgeous dark hair. She also had a flair for fashion. As skinny as she was she was a bit of a toughy and had a good chance of inheriting the Camille Stabile image. She never talked to me, maybe grubbed a cigarette now and then, but would look at me with a bullyish eye. I was slightly, but only slightly afraid of her. We were all below age 14 but it was a full blown cursing, peer pressure, chain cigarette smoking crowd. A few older kids would occassionally come by, the Morlocks, Eddie Sharkey, Eddie Kerwin. My father had finally bought a car after having been nagged his whole married life about it. It was a blue Pinto, and as my parents, especially my father, did not want me anywhere near that Gotham corner, once in a while the others would let me know if the blue pinto was coming around, and I'd run in and hide in the store. I was not truly happy with this crowd. I didn't feel as though I fit in, I didn't feel as though they really had anything to offer me in terms of inspiration for living, it was just a place to go and smoke really. Yet the whole neighborhood was part of this crowd except for my cousin Jerry who was still considered cool. Somehow he earned great favor and friendship with a lot of the boys of this crowd without actually smoking and hanging out, something that has always mystified me, but then he is a scorpio. There was a very good looking boy my age close by named Albi Ferrone, who kept very much to himself in a depressed way but was considered 'cool.' I was bookended on Biltmore Avenue and the other side of our Gotham Manor village's Holland Avenue by the neighborhood 'rock stars' which were Mike Ruiz, a chuckling harmless type who could kill you with his electric leads on his Gibson, and Bobby Defino with his Peter Fonda look and swagger of a walk, who dug to sing, man. Occassionally the crowd would drift down four blocks to the old creek of actual water below two steep small hills where the rowdier ones of our bunch would drink cheap wine, as Bobby the rock star would croon to his acoustic guitar. He really made me sick, even though he wasn't bad looking, and Mike Ruiz, although he lived on my block, I hadn't gotten the chance to know him or meet him properly but he seemed to me like a joke. 

Back at high school the Gotham kids all sat on the floor near the front doors of the school, it was our territory. It was the only territory. The jocks didn't actually have a 'territory' and a few of them were actually part of the Gotham gang, other kids who came from the other sections of Elmont, 'Locustwood Manor' for the richer kids, 'Parkhurst Manor' for other kids that were a little bit more well off than us, and had better houses, and 'Argo Village' which was probably the closest to our neighborhood financially, were all more mature and annonymous and got on with their grades and lives and dreams of going to college. They were cool too, they smoked pot, although I didn't, and looked for pills, which I did, and I did have one friend from outside of the Gotham crew and she lived in 'Argo Village'. Margaret was into smoking pot in her bedroom upstairs which I couldn't believe she'd have the nerve to do, I never would smoke with her except to just try it and I didn't feel anything so I just didn't bother at all. She would steal pills from her older brother and I would steal Darvons from my medicine cabinet that belonged to my father. My mother was so convinced that I had allergies even though the arm patch test only revealed allergies to Rabbits and tobacco. One of the side perks of going for shots every week around that time, for some non-existant 'allergy', was that I was given loads of small bottles of liquid Phenobarbital just in case I got asthma. Slowly but surely every drop of this stuff disappeared and my mother never said a thing about it. Her and my father were too concerned about my cigarette use which I denied. I would come home from being out and go straight to the bathroom as they would scream to let them smell my fingers and sometimes in terrified desperation I would jab my hands into the toilet bowl and wash them there lest they hear the taps get turned on! With Margaret though I felt inspired, I hated the art rock she liked, but she would smoke a joint and laugh at everything and only get serious when she would put on her beloved Yes, or Strawbs and her favorite Rennaissance. It would take decades before I realized that Annie Haslam was one of the greatest female rock vocalists of all time, if not the.  One morning I decided to part my long dirty blond hair on the side instead of the middle, it looked very unique, and I made off for school.  As I sat in the front with the Gotham crowd before the days classes began the toughie Josephine Nunziata with her red vinyl motorcycle type jacket danced in front of me saying loudly, "And what's this, Miss Swinging 60's?  Are you supposed to be Miss Swinging 60's with that side part? Huh? Look at her," she'd summon to the others, "Miss 60's with the side part."  She was actually making fun of me, as in looking for a fight!  Being Italian myself there was just so much of this I would take before I'd start to react, I started to get angry and it showed on my ever expressive face. She danced away from me and left me alone. The bell rang to start the day. The next day after I put my hair back, she came up to me in the front and sat down. Nicely she said, "What happened to the hair? It looked ok. I like the 60's I wasn't making fun of you, I love the Rolling Stones, I love Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards, do you?"

"No I never liked them really, I love the Beatles."
"Oh yeah? I have the album Hot Rocks, did you ever hear that??"
"No."
"Well maybe someday you can come over. I'll play it for you, it's great, it's the greatest."

My life at home was miserable, my parents fought more than they ever did in Brooklyn, and it was terrible. Once one of the neighbors actually called the police, but everything settled down and became ok. My father worked all week in the dreadful factory in Queens, and he looked forward to weekends of rest only to have my mother, who was also working all week at this point as a secretary in the local library, clean house completely for most of Saturday as she raged on complaining about everything under the Sun, including him and me and even Donna who had really no personality at all, but was just a Straight A student who loved her parents and respected all their silly wishes. For the most part my mother's anger was vented on my father who would be easy to vent on. His laid back, lazy Cancerian ways could easily aggravate most women never mind a Leo woman, but I did feel sorry for him. Though when she turned her tirade onto me, he didn't feel bad for me, he was glad it wasn't him, and to keep it going he would join in with her against me, they would both gang up on me and no matter how nonsensical or insane some of the things they would say, I was all alone, and if I turned to my sister Donna for help she would either say nothing and ignore the situation, or moan as if it was my fault or side with them. People have talked about being 'abused' and a lot of that is sometimes either passive-aggressive behavior leading to things like anoerxia and the like, or unsupportive substance- addicted parents.  In my house there was nothing passive about the abuse, it was out there and on the table: I was a piece of shit, selfish good for nothing who would never get anywhere in life. Thank you. They only felt this way because I was their offspring and they hated themselves, but they left this little piece out, I guess that was to be understood without being said. Thank the good Lord that I realized this though! I suppose my mother was miserable because she was disappointed. Growing up in a huge broken-home and she married my father, she always said, to get out of that house and try to have a normal life. It seemed she wasn't happy though, perhaps she didn't love my father and felt that she was stuck with him because she had two daughters, and no one had any money. Besides my father was a jealous Italian mad man who would go to jail for murder if she were to even think of thinking to look for someone else. My father was miserable because he was just a lazy cancer who had no education but was willing to slave at a job to keep everything going day to day. With no ambition to do anything else in his whole life but just that, and he was never inspired to learn anything about anything. He just watched baseball game, after football game, after hockey game, year after year for his whole life. There would be  nothing really wrong with this actually but the first thing you'd need I guess to live in a family like this was a wife that loved you and would tolerate such boredom. That wasn't happening. Or perhaps love had grown into contempt out of stagnation and an inability to deal with one's own inherent problems.

I was glad to have some Fontanas across the street from us. If I were to have a real knockdown drag out fight with my parents I could always go over there and hang out, and tell them and complain. My grandfather spoke no English and only drank his burgundy and waved hello, my grandmother would smile at me as I complained and she'd brush my hair as I'd ramble on. My Aunt Jenny would scratch her head furiously as if I'd aggravated a scalp problem she had and scream in a mocking way, "Don't talk about my brother!!" and my Aunt Philly would put hand cream on her over-tanned, dehydrated hands with an ever-present cigarette in the ash tray and whine, "I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you." They all knew what my father was like, they lived with him.

Josephine lived four blocks away in a most interesting house. It was cute and brick with low ceilings and small rooms that were many. There was no upstairs despite the low ceilings, and a finished low-ceiling basement that was finished with gold veined mirrors and various shagged rugs. Josephine's little haven was a small section of the plush cozy basement sectioned off with long red and black glass beads. It looked like a hippie palace and I loved it. Her father and mother were Italian, from Brooklyn too and about the age of my parents only they were very conscious of being 'hip'. They had two older sons that were long haired and bearded and married to two super-cool beautiful hippie chicks. The older of the young couples were into astrology and heroin and the younger was her slightly better looking brother and his beautiful Oriental wife, they only smoked pot. She also had a younger sister as I did, but hers was fighting with the parents as much as Josephine would. It seemed to me like a better household and one of the reasons was because when they got looney, and fought - in front of me - they'd revel in their looniness knowing they were all looney, then they'd laugh, and make up. It was down in that dimly lit shaggy basement that I became a 'Stones person' and I guess I still am!  Josephine and I would listen to Hot Rocks over and over again, and she would tell me how her brother had Exile on Main Street, her favorite album and that she'd be getting at Christmas. I became more open-minded towards the Stones and grew to love the music as I watched Josephine do the chicken and shuffle like Mick Jagger circa the Gimme Shelter era movie, through the glass beads and all over the entire basement. Though I found a real fondness for the earlier Stones cuts on the Hot Rocks album, and as we'd look at the pictures together inside the album she educated me on the Rolling Stones and noticing I was attracted to the older music and to the photos of Brian Jones she had decided I guess, that my guy in the band would be Brian Jones. Even though he was dead. Together we would go to Great Eastern which was the closest department store, it was in Elmont about a 20 minute walk away. It was the spot where I had eventually bought all the Beatles albums just the couple of years before, and Josephine and I would look through all the Rolling Stones albums deciding which ones to get next, which ones we'd ask for as gifts on coming holidays, and it was all very exciting. We got on the N6 bus up Hempstead Turnpike into the next town over, Franklin Square, and there she bought her beloved 9 feet by 12 feet poster of Mick Jagger at Hyde Park, in his lavender tank top and tight white trousers and long hair and make up, I bought a 2 x3 poster of Mick taken sometime during the 1969 tour. When I came home for dinner the next night my father greeted me at the screen door waiting for me. He said, "Come here, " and walked me to my bedroom, where he opened the door which I kept closed (as if to be independent and grown up).

As he opened it slowly and dramatically his left arm swung out at the poster, "You hate this guy!"

"No I don't. You hate this guy!!" I said.

"I don't know," he continued, "I think I'm going to forbid you from hanging out with this girl."

We still would hang out at the corner at Gotham Avenue once in a while and Frankie would still harass me but when Josephine would show up he would stop because she would yell at him and start insulting him and of course he couldn't stand to be embarrassed like that. One Summer evening in 1974 was the last night that either of us would go up there, it was the night Big Jim wacked me in the head with a stickball bat. I was leaning against the wall of the stores and he was standing in front of me with the bat. In a slow deliberate manner he would swing the bat and land it right before the side of my face and stop. He was kidding around and I knew so, so therefore I stood there. I trusted him completely, and he trusted himself too. But something happened. He took a swing full blast and forgot to stop and I got wacked on the right side of the face right in front of my ear. Things went a little blurry only momentarily, but I sat down on the curb crying more from shock than from any pain. Everyone saw it. Big Jim was horrified at what had happened and turned white as a ghost and threw the bat down immediately and hung his head in disbelief. He was in a state of shock more than my own. Everybody knew it was an accident and was stunned that I was okay. Had I been hit slightly higher I probably would have lost an eye and maybe even had brain damage. Had I been hit slightly lower my jaw would have broke. But there was nothing wrong with me, so I always thought. As the years went by my left shoulder got higher and higher especially in photographs and the memory of this incident and Big Jim all came back in 1993 when I had a full blown explosion of 'TMJ', the disease named for the part of the body of exactly where I got hit. 

Even though it was an accident and I appeared to be okay, both Josephine and I knew that we were through with the Gotham hang out, we both just knew it. We knew our future would consist of us just hanging out together in her basement and listening to the Rolling Stones. We blessed through listening to every track on the new album Goats Head Soup, it was their latest record at the time as the new one, It's Only Rock n Roll, was being finished and we loved it. Then we had our moments of listening to the Brian Jones Stones as well as we fell in love with the albums Between the Buttons, and Flowers, and Aftermath. We would go to the library together and take out books on the Rolling Stones and this was more up my alley than Josephine. She had more of 'party' mentality as I had more of a study and obsess mentality.

By then I cut my bangs as I was getting very into the Brian Jones persona and Josephine began to notice, then she began to become concerned about me. She felt I was retreating into my own fantasy world, which would be almost normal for a young teenage suburban girl, but not about someone who was dead, and especially not with Brian Jones. He is a character whose life story was sad as well as even his death which was so shrouded in mystery and a darkness so dark that even the present day Rolling Stones would not discuss him in any interviews of the day.

The days at school were as depressed and dark as my own aura was getting. I was not doing well, I hated it, I had no interest in any of it, except English class where I did so well. I was even 'failed' on one report because the teacher refused to believe I wrote it. When I threatened her with going to the principal with this, she grabbed the paper out of my hand and turned the 'F' into an 'A'. I hated gym class and I hated the jocks even though I loved my cousin Jerry who was a star on the football team. I couldn't do anything in the gymnastics class and when the lesbian teacher would call my name to twirl on some bars, and walk on a high piece of woodbeam, I'd simply say 'I'll take the F' and not even attempt it. Except that is for basketball where I came alive and would grab that ball violently away from anyone who had it and run and dribble and nearly always make the basket. It was this course during the year that would save me from failing the entire gym course which would have made graduating impossible by the time 12th grade came along, and as it was I ended up leaving that school with a 65 average, a D minus that is, my father says he held his breath. My parents began putting it into my head that I would definitely not be college material, and it was all because of the music, and this Rolling Stones nonsense, and I would probably have to go straight out to work, and never mind these dreams I had of professions like 'clothing designer,' which I had from when I was a kid in Brooklyn, or 'archaeologist,' or even 'photographer'. Those were rich kids professions and we were poor people; that was my mothers mantra, "We're poor people." 

Through the local newspapers Josephine and I had gotten word of the rumor that the Rolling Stones were actually going to play the following year, we were very excited about this and it pretty much became the centerpiece of our existence. It wasn't enough for me though I had gotten this crazy and fantastic idea that I would start a fan club for Brian Jones. After all he deserved one, there must be loads of Rolling Stones fans everywhere and yet no one officially even in magazines ever seems to mention Brian Jones at all, so who would I need permission from?  He's dead! It would also be a way for me to establish myself as a somebody in the rock music world. I would be the President of the Brian Jones Fan Club. I was intoxicated with the idea, and I ran it by Josephine who agreed with it but I could tell there was a side of her that disapproved.  I did my research though and found there were fan clubs for Buddy Holly, so just because he was dead it didn't make it out of the question. I would even cite the other fan clubs for dead stars as proof that this wasn't too weird to whomever questioned my sanity. I thought that what I could do was find out-of-print photos of Brian in old magazines and just xerox them and staple them together and send them out, in an 'underground' fashion.

There in the Winter of 1974 things were getting interesting and possibly exciting for me. First and foremost there was the idea the Stones would tour the following year. Josephine had made sure that all would be well because she had her two older druggie sisters-in-law agree that when the Stones played the Garden they would chaperone us. Then there was my fan club mentioned in Doc Rock's column of a magazine I had just discovered, Rock Scene Magazine. Mail started to come to my house from all over the country and then the world, my parents of course began to freak out but this was a small price to pay I felt. The third fantastic thing that happened to Josephine and I in the Winter of 1974 was the release of the movie, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones." A loud, raucous, full-blast full-color up-close two hours worth of concert footage of the 1972 tour which featured a lot of the songs from the great Exile on Main Street album. We saw the movie so many times we should have gotten sick of it, but we never did, ever. It was a great Winter. And then I was called in to start to see the school psychologist.

I didn't know and never did find out just who 'sent me' to the doctor but I really didn't care. I actually enjoyed the attention, the fact that 'they' sent me to the doctor because I'm troubled and someone, or maybe the whole school was concerned about me. It didn't make me feel crazy, or defensive, it made me feel like a rock star. It made me feel like Brian Jones. The thing was it wasn't really all a superficial thing my obsession with Brian Jones, it really was weird. I felt as if I was conjuring him up, and wanted to. I felt as if I understood his sad weird short life very well, and I revelled in it, up to and including the mysterious death 'accident' at the pool. I had no idea I was really tapping into a troubled spirit that not only had a sad short life, but was murdered, as it came out many years later. I had all my photo albums filled with rare pictures of Brian Jones, actual photographs - some given by fan club members almost all of which were older than I was, and clippings from old teen magazines and the like. One night when I went to sleep I had a most disturbing dream. I was at the house called Cotchford Farm, to this day still my favorite place on earth and I have visited it plenty. It was where Brian Jones lived and died, and in the dream I was in a shed which was to the right at the far end of the pool if you were looking at the house. I was in a bathing suit and I was with a bunch of different people I didn't know and we were all rushing to dress and leave.  I was awoken and was wide awake and there was the strangest feeling in the room. All I could describe it as was 'dead' - it wasn't happy, it wasn't sad, it wasn't trying to be scary, it wasn't trying to be friendly, it was just the presence of death. I was terrified. I was frozen in my bed, and the spirit of this death was exactly over in the corner where all my photo albums were. Nothing was seen though except for on the floor, where there was a large cross of little lights. They were the kind of lights that shine through your window from a street lamp, and I thought that must be what it was. I had never noticed it before though, and I thought to myself I must check to see if this is there again, and why a cross anyway? I said out loud but very silently, "please go away, please go away, I'm scared."  After that I fell instantly fast asleep. There wasn't even a full minute between my saying that and going to sleep, it was as if the ghost had the power to put me right back to sleep just as he had awoken me from the dream. After that night I was terrified of Brian Jones for a long time, I wanted to just run the fan club in a business like manner and use it to give me some kind of title so that I could have access into the music business. I couldn't help but wonder though whether there was an actual shed where it was. At the time of the dream there were never any published pictures of Brian's house anywhere, yet. The first ones would start to surface a few years after my dream, and since then many have surfaced. I telephoned an English member of my fan club as she had been to the house.  I asked her about the garden, the pool, the shed, and I shuddered to learn from her that there was in fact a small shed right there, that had some bicycles in it. I didn't think too much of the dream though. I didn't know where it came from except a faint rumour that the night Brian died there was a party at his house. This rumour has never been confirmed though, and of the many many books written since that time of my fan club it wasn't until 1999 that his girlfriend present at the house that night said there was in fact no party going on, but that Brian had indeed been murdered right there in the pool. The party rumours though still persist today.

Getting sent to our school psychologist, Miss Thompson was actually one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. I was such a twisted up weirdo about Brian Jones at that point that I would get there and couldn't talk about it, not really say the things I wanted to say, the things I felt. The impressions I'd gotten about his life's scenario which were largely taken from a weird book at the time by rock author Tony Scaduto entitled, "Everybody's Lucifer." So the solution Miss Thompson came up with was that when I was feeling these things I would write them all down. I would write write write my head off about these things and then at our weekly sessions she would silently read every bit of my work and file it away and it wasn't ever discussed. She told me to just keep writing. I went to her for that whole year and at the end we tore up all my paper together. That was it. I thought it was most peculiar but it was a great thing: it taught me how to really write, to express myself through writing. and enjoy it. Praise God for whoever sent me to the head doctor!

            When the Rolling Stones were to come to Madison Square Garden there was a major buzz about the ticket sales all over the area. Representing our neck of the woods was Josephine Nunziata and myself. It was a Friday evening and mom was to go shopping after work which meant that I had to heat up the sauce for when she got home so that all we would have to do is cook the macaroni. Early that morning in the high school cafeteria, which ran the rock radio very low, the other kids were thrilled about the Rolling Stones tour because they got to be entertained by the two local Stones nuts acting hysterical sitting closest to where the speaker was. They had seen us act crazy recently before when the radio station had planned to play the new Rolling Stones single, Fool To Cry. Stones fever was in the air and even their manager from the old days was getting in on the act by releasing a fantastic album entitled Metamorphosis which had old outtakes featuring Brian Jones' Stones. The ticket places were announced and the closest to us was a record store in Baldwin. We cut out of school immediately and headed for Josephine's house where her father gave in and drove us down to the place. The line went for blocks and blocks. I didn't put any call in at home to my parents at all. It was to be the first of many times when I would really shock them with my actions. I was terrified to go home though, I figured the Stones news was sure to be on the 6 o'clock and then 11 o'clock news so they would gather that my disappearance would have something to do with that. Shortly after 12.30 in the morning I was escorted to the door by Sal Nunziata, Josephine's father, he was very nice and explained to my father that he took us to get tickets for the Stones, and that for most of the day and all of the night he was close by the line with us. My father started to shout at him and ask him if he was 'nuts', but Sal kept his cool and I ran into my room and shut the door, pretending to be undressing for bed. When Sal left my father yelled, "you're punished for two weeks, you're not going out of the house."

"Ok," I replied.

I must've sounded a bit too chipper for his liking, so he added,
"and I have a good mind to not let you go to that concert."

"No! Oh no! Oh please, I have to go!" I started to cry and that was the end of the evening. I spent my two week prison time at the house happily in bliss, I was going to see the Rolling Stones. It would be only my second rock concert. The first being the year before when I went to the local Nassau Coliseum and watched Poco and John Sebastian. A real Frye Boots kind of audience. In our high school there were two kinds of music fans there was the Frye boot type which loved the Allmans first and foremost, and other related type acts like Leon Russell and then there was the English fans, who loved Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and the more evolved kids fancied Yes, Pink Floyd and the dreaded Emerson Lake and Palmer.

I preferred the Frye boot type really though my favorites were the people making the most rocking music around: the Stones, Bad Company, Mott the Hoople and David Bowie. Many a passionate debate erupted between me and groups of kids in our classes. One of my most embarrassing moments came one day in our Economics class in the 11th grade. It was a class that I was rather quiet in, I sat in the back corner and respected the young cool teacher who was married to one of our beautiful female art teachers.  At this point of our schooling though everyone in the classes knew everyone else and what they were about, even if they didn't socialize with them.  Once in the full to capacity classroom the teacher had everyone's attention and said, "Now if the Rolling Stones bought five pairs of boots-" he was cut off in mid sentence as the entire class slowly turned towards me in the back and just sat there looking at me. I must have visibly turned several shades of color as they all were staring and smirking at me as the teacher said, "what's this all about?" I was completely choked up and just sat there suffering all beet red in my coolness, until the silence was broken by the laughter of my fellow students.

The Rolling Stones concert was everything it was cracked up to be, and Josephine's two druggie hippie sisters-in-law were quite glad to take us along and thanked us for waiting on line for tickets for them. As word drifted around our school about our looniness the stories got to the ears of Lisa Uterano, the daughter of major big-shot Vice President of Atlantic Records, the Stones' record company. Lisa was a definite frye boot type, madly (and seemingly odd to me) in love with Leon Russell who she'd met, but she loved the Stones. She introduced herself to Josephine who immediately shared the news with me and we were thrilled and embarrassed all at once. One day my doorbell rang and as I answered it the first thing that came flying at me was an 8x10 glossy photo of Mick Jagger that read in black marker, To Josephine, Love, Mick Jagger. Lisa told her father all about her and he got Mick to sign a picture to her. Shortly afterward I was introduced to Lisa by Josephine. Lisa Uterano was to become my next best friend, and I hers, from 1976 on, until about 1984.

When I turned 16 I had gotten a job at the local library courtesy of my mother who had connections and was now working at one of the local grammar schools. I continued to run the fan club which now was called officially, The International Brian Jones Memorial Fan Club and I had many members still mostly older than I was.

I soon acquired my first boyfriend whom I met at the library, Jeff Kramer, a blond haired blue eyed aries boy. We had nothing in common at all except our attraction for each other, yet all we ever did was kiss, and nothing more. We only lasted just under a year. But I was growing up even though I was still far from the person that my parents hoped I would be. I also puzzled them with a new friend of mine, who was five years old. She was the cutest little girl who was following me around the neighborhood. Her parents were both deeply troubled, addicted to alcohol and valium because of their loss of a baby from years before little Maureen was born. Maureen's mother even had hopes that I would adopt her in a few years when I became legal age. I fed her rock n' roll in my room at my parents' house as my mother watched in horror. My parents were growing more and more hostile toward me every year, what with not doing well in school, and running a fan club for a dead druggie rock star, who founded the most decadent and now famous of rock n' roll bands. Still within myself I was feeling better than the few years before. I had elevated myself beyond the hipness of the Gotham crowd, and I was ready for anything; but I could have easily gone the way of a lot of the old Gotham crowd in the years that were to come.

Rest In Peace: the Morlock brothers, Eddie Sharkey, Fleet Owens, Eddie Kerwin, Fred Kerwin, Charlie Tomasetti, Phil Stabile, Albi Ferrone, Tommy Cataneese, Tara Malone, Big Jim Malone.

Chapter 4
 
 
"Ain't this baby great, and ain't that guy beautiful?"
 -Iggy Pop
 
 

It would be years before I'd be keen into astrologie and all other sorts of divination, but nevertheless there was something very fateful about that day in early July of 1976 when Josephine and I set out for New York City from Elmont.

I thought our mutual buzz was more about 'going to the city' than to see this seemingly strange woman, Patti Smith, perform. We both had no idea what to expect musically, didn't even talk about it. All we knew was what we had learned from Rock Scene Magazine, that she was some sort of Queen of a 'scene' that we never heard about or read about anywhere else except in that single publication. It almost seemed as if it was fictitious, this scene reported on with much excitement. The only reference points ever given to anything in the 'real world' was the occasional mention of the Stones, so of course that was enough to get me and Jo interested, and it was enough for me keep track of things. Plus, Rock Scene Magazine were nice enough to pay attention to little me in Elmont, by advertising my fan club for Brian Jones. The first sign of this scene being a reality was seeing a small mention in the daily newspaper about Central Park concerts and there listed was one of these characters, the 'Patti Smith' one, so off we were.

It was to be our last 'date' in our friendship and I had no idea of that, but I guess she did. She wore that open-mouthed Gemini smile that I learned a lot about since then, which although sincere was completely detached. I don't know whether Josephine really knew what she was doing or not but basically she was giving me away to this scene, she was dropping me off there: this is your new life, now have fun. It was a beautiful day, and as we filed into Central Park we were excited to see that there were so many people to see Patti Smith and wondered who they all were, and if they'd seen her before, how much did they know about all this. We were pretty far back, and then the show began. It was sounding like nothing I ever heard before. It was rock n roll alright, but not like the Stones really, and not like the 60's or 50's, and thank the good Lord nothing at all like the day's current sounds. Besides it rocking, it was highly emotional, it was almost 'sick', you know, mental-case like. I would learn in the coming months that it was 'art' (or art/rat).

From the moment the band got on the stage though I was pretty much fixated on the guitarist to the left. The energy I was feeling from him was unbelievable. I couldn't see his face and I had no idea what his name was. All I knew was that he had skinny legs and had a big red Stones tongue on the back of his white and green windbreaker. His hair was fair, and he played the hell out of that Gibson guitar. His energy seemed as sunny as the day that day, nothing dark about it, in fact it was a perfect juxtaposition to Patti and her energy, and her voice and her lyrics, as well as the guitarist to the right, and the keyboardist which all seemed pretty moody feeling. One felt though that the musical talent, as well as the 'fuck' energy that was making everybody in the place including the band, rock, was all coming from this sunny guy with the dirty blond hair.  This observation was truly correct as he was the venus ruled one (Taurus) and the others, saturn (Capricorn). Josephine and I didn't confer much at all we were under the spell of the performance, standing the entire show with the whole audience and dancing in our spots. We'd never heard a single song before except the bit that was 'Land of a thousand dances' which she broke into during one of the original numbers. It was such a cool moment for us, we couldn't even say, or scream it, we just were it.  Josephine though was really excited for me about the few things I did say to her like, "Who is that guy?!?!?!? Who is he?!?!?!?!" She was laughing away, then she leaned back and asked some guy to borrow his binoculars.  She looked through them and said, "He's cute, look." I took them from her and that was it. The music blasted around us and I could hear her laughing as I was falling in love through the binoculars. His prominent jaw and high cheekbones were his prominent feature, and he was as pretty as a prince from another age put into modern rock dress and given a guitar. All I knew was that I had to know him.

Toward the end of the concert they introduced another guitar player onto the stage named Tom Verlaine who the whole audience seemed to know and gave a big hand to. His name was familiar to me from Rock Scene Magazine.  That make believe world that was turning out to be real apparently. They did a wild emotional song, "Break It Up" and even though it was the first time I ever heard it, I felt as though something was happening to me inside my heart and it made me want to cry, even though I was as happy as a lark.  Core premonition.

Our ride home was pretty quiet. In fact it took blocks for us to even say, "that was great wasn't it?" My mind was spinning around with plans about finding their album and finding out everything I could about that guitar player. I wouldn't have Jo to share all this with. Even though she had a great time she knew it was time for her to break away from our friendship and try something new, discover it on her own, and no regrets, and no once-a-year get-togethers either. Our friendship was just over, Gemini-style.

Had I not had a new obsession it probably would have really hurt me deeply. After all, my father had constantly said, and still does, that Josephine "ruined me" whatever that meant. He was referring to our intense Rolling Stones obsession together of course. I bought the Patti Smith 'Horses' album, loved every minute of it, got 'possessed' by all the spirits therein, found out that the gorgeous guy's name was Ivan Kral, and thought that I wanted to dress like Patti on the cover of the album, as far as my Senior year back-to-school wardrobe was concerned. It shouldn't be too hard to pull together. I found out in the latest Rock Scene Magazine that the CBGB place had their own recording label, and album out as well.  I thought that it would be wonderful if I went there one Saturday late afternoon and bought the club's album and checked out the place when it would be empty. I knew just who my accomplice would be.

The thing I liked about Margaret's friend Joanne who lived across the circle from her was that she was pretty quiet but upbeat and liked to laugh, and even though she wasn't must of a conversationalist, she was lively and seemed into doing new things, especially going into the city, into the village (!) avec moi! Roseann Fontana! I called CBGB one day nervously at 4 o'clock and asked them if I could come by on Saturday around this time and buy the album and they said "sure!"

Joanne had learned all about my magical experience at Central Park, and she was a great audience for me. She was going to be a great friend I thought. Lisa Uterano was really my best friend at the time, but her dad, Mr. Record Company Big Shot had obviously seen too much rock n roll night life, 70's style, to let Lisa explore it, especially at 15 years old! Lisa wasn't rebellious in the fashion that I was, unfortunately for her. I didn't have to worry about Joanne disapproving of me, I didn't have to worry about not being cool, everything I did was A-OK with Joanne. In fact she somewhat idolized me. She was beautiful, a beautiful Italian girl with black, very black straight hair, parted down the middle. She looked half goth, half hippie really, and she was into that. She had white white porcelain skin, very odd for an Italian I thought, I guess she was Northern, and pretty eyes. She was only 5' tall, and had an ok figure, but you never noticed it, she seemed to be very hung up about her body, and her sexuality, and she draped herself in baggy clothes of beautiful fabrics.  All of her life-force was concentrated in her face. She was a fantastic listener, and let me talk and talk and talk. She didn't ever want to contribute much it seemed, and that was fine with me. There were times during our friendship when I felt like a bit of a vampire. That I was draining her completely and leaving her for dead. She was Aquarius as Lisa was, but Lisa had an incredible personality even though she also had that Aquarian trait where they wouldn't let on too much about themselves.  Joanne and Lisa didn't like each other at all, even though they really didn't know each other. It was an instinctive thing. Or maybe they were just fighting over my attentions, which was probably the case. Despite all of Lisa's affected regretful declinations to my city invitations she insisted on knowing every last detail of every venture I went on. She
would beam, all big-eyed, and smooth down her short blonde curls. Yet for all her feminine looks she was oddly masculine, chain-smoking as her beloved Leon Russell records blasted from her bedroom in her family's up-scale home.

Joanne and I entered the sweet looking record shop called Bleecker Bob's on MacDougal Street. Behind the counter stood Bob, a very typical looking New York Jew. I had noticed that he had home-made magazines hanging behind him on a wall. I immediately introduced myself as the President of the Brian Jones Memorial Fan Club and asked him if he'd sell my fanzines. He didn't hesitate to say yes, and he got into a conversation with me about Brian. He told me that at the Monterey Pop Festival Brian and Jimi Hendrix ingested the DMT drug by putting it on their eyeballs under their lids. This revelation freaked me out a little. Then I noticed behind Bob was hanging a large size newspaper called New York Rocker, with that Blondie girl on the cover. Next to her body were the words Ivan Kral.  I cut Bob's ramblings short and asked to immediately have the newspaper.  I bought it and as we walked out and toward the direction of where CBGB would be, we had the paper open, looking at the pictures and skimming the article. "I knew he couldn't be an American!" I exclaimed, as I found out he was from Czechoslovakia. I didn't even know where the fuck Czechoslovakia was. It was from the article that I learned it was a communist country. All this was absolute food for my romantic head. A communist! Is that why he's beautiful? Is that what communists look like?  Joanne and I got to CBGB, and we were both nervous. 

When we entered we found it looked even more dank and dingy than in the black and white pictures in the magazine. It was, for God's sake just a bar of an odd shape. In the middle of the place sitting on the bench was Hilly the owner and a girl with an acoustic guitar. He was teaching her how to play "Your Cheatin' Heart", I was touched by this and tried not to interrupt. My mother had gotten me a cheap acoustic guitar when I was 12 and I even had a few lessons myself. I was a dabbler and found it enjoyable, I had even written a song. When Hilly stopped and looked up I stepped forward and announced that I was here to buy the album, trying to sound as cool as possible. He got up with a stretch and walked slowly back to the front with a wave of his arm. In those days he was so very nice, and open, he was almost too nice to be 'cool' but I would learn that most of the CBGB scene was like that, and the Max's Kansas City scene as well, well almost.

"Do the groups Television and Patti Smith really hang out here besides just play here??" I asked, taking advantage of his kindness.

"Oh yeah!"

"Does Ivan Krall hang out here?"

"Yeah, they all hang out here!"

"I would love to come here but I just turned 17, I have to wait."
"Oh no, we'll let you in, don't worry, come on down, just don't drink."

In those days you could do that sort of thing. I guess. I mean, it was still illegal of couse, but it got very strict in the post-punk era when there was a lot of rowdiness with the hard-core post-punk scene and CBGB had to start making matinees to keep everyone happy. 

When we walked out of there, with me holding my CBGB album containing music of more bands that I'd never heard of at all, me and Joanne were over the moon. Life was getting good, so I thought.

Things seemed to be moving fast, school was just in and I had found out that Patti and Television were coming to Long Island to play at Hofstra University. I was very excited and despite the fact that Lisa was growing more interested with my stories and Joanne was my new partner in crime, I had no one to go to the concert with that night, I had to go alone, but that was ok, as long as I was going. Surely my parents didn't object to me going to a show at a college. My fellow High School students noticed I was evolving; from being a strange girl that supposedly ran a 'fan club' for the Rolling Stone who died, into a girl in her own world. A world that existed of something outside of Elmont, the school and the town, outside of the medium of tv and radio and popular rock magazines. I would frequently be wearing black jeans, a white button down shirt, a black tie (!), and a baseball sweater of black and white stripes. I topped this with a black beret on my newly straightened hair. Hanging out with Joanne with her glistening and straight hair really made me hate my dirty blonde curly hair, which curled up at puberty. She would dutifully help me straighten my hair every three weeks with gobs of poison over her bathtub which she'd comb out with the kit's complimentary large pink plastic comb. Joanne's incredibly tolerant mother used to check in on us and always walk slowly away shaking her head. Joanne had no father, I don't ever think I got the real whole story, her being an elusive Aquarius and all. If she didn't want to talk about her life then who was I to drag it out of her? Besides of course it gave me more time to speak about mine. My miserable life with the miserable three on the other side of Elmont.

On the late afternoon of the Hofstra Concert I confidently walked through the Hempstead Bus Station to the place where the bus would stop to continue the ride to Uniondale when I noticed that a smallish guy was staring at me. He looked about my age, and he was with a girl also around the same age. They sure didn't look as though they were from Elmont. When I got behind them in the queue waiting for the bus he was holding onto a bag. He held it tightly to his chest and he was slowly bopping and moving, as if he was dancing to some music, but there wasn't any. He kept his eyes on me so much that I was forced to say something to him.  "You going to see Patti?"

He seized the opportunity to speak to me. The girl seemed very snotty. Her name was Lori, his name was Michael. They warmed up to me when I said that even though I lived on Long Island, I was "really" from Brooklyn, like them. We talked about Central Park, and about Television, and he told me he had pictures, that he'd taken himself. I confessed that I loved Ival Kral and Michael said he had pictures of Ivan. "You know Ivan?" At that point the bus doors opened and he literally dragged me to the back of the bus with Lori smirking. She had made it known to me that her attitude had nothing to do with me, which I was glad because I wanted to know her. Here I had found two new friends in the 'scene' and they were from my long lost beloved Brooklyn of all places! I couldn't wait to tell my friends in Elmont, I couldn't wait to tell my parents!!

It hurt me a lot years later when Michael would become an A&R man in a few major record labels and would not offer me a recording contract, even though he really liked my music and absolutely loved certain songs.  Considering I was one of the best songwriters in America, I could never understand why the few people I was close to who got into the business end of the music industry wouldn't really help me out. What consoled me was that none of the few that I was actually 'friends' with in the business were never really movers and shakers, leaders, as it were. Not giving me a chance in, I could see why. They were the fearful types. Fearful types are never leaders in any branchof the art world, even the corporate branch.
But maybe that goes for life in general?

The photos Michael showed me were of himself with Ivan. Michael told me with a laugh how you could see his baby powder on his chest, because he loved to put lots of baby powder on after a shower. He laughed, Lori lit another cigarette, and when Michael informed me that he couldn't wait to see Fred Smith from Television because he was his "husband" I realized he was a homosexual. This of course impressed me even more. So there was the three of us kids, walking around the grounds of Hofstra near the theatre. Lori was in love with Richard Lloyd from Television, I was in love with the communist Ivan Kral from Patti Smith and Michael was in love with his husband. It was chilly out so Michael gave me his little navy blue zip-up sweatshirt with the hood, and then he gave me his silver bracelet. He was so beautiful to me, just because he liked me so much immediately. It was such a wonderful feeling. A feeling that I never felt before. A boy my age 'loved' me and wasn't ashamed to show it and he didn't even want to kiss me. He just had an unspoken intuition that I was 'it'.

The show was great, although not as great as Central Park, but nearly so. Afterward we went around the back outside not to ask for an autograph or anything, but to just watch to see who left with who, who sat next to who in the cars, et cetera.

School continued to be horrific. I didn't fit in anywhere, with anyone except Lisa Uterano. Joanne who was a year younger than me wasn't in because she hated it, didn't do well, and her mother okayed it for her to drop out. I, of course, would never even be allowed to request such a thing. My parents really liked Joanne though. They liked her because she had a beautiful face. They felt bad for her because she didn't have a father. They liked her because she lived with her grandmother, as well as her mother, and they were all Italian. All my parents said when I told them of her dropping out was, "that's crazy." I always thought my father's own school stories were particularly strange. He always used to go on about how he'd had to quit school.  When pressed it would be revealed that it was in the 9th grade.

He would say, "I had to quit school to pay for my teeth! I needed new teeth and we couldn't afford it so I had to go to work to pay for my teeth!"

I think it was only once surprisingly that I challenged this. "You had no teeth? In 9th grade?"

"That's right. They were all rotten."

It wasn't until recently when I asked my father why he doesn't keep up some courses in drawing and painting as he goes once every three or four years, that he revealed to me, "I can't stand to be in a school! The hallways! Just the smell of a school! It reminds me of when I was a kid, I couldn't stand it! That's why I quit!"

The news came in somehow that Patti Smith would play an entire week at the Bottom Line. This filled me with great anxiety. The Bottom Line was not CBGB and I was not 18 years old. All I could do was resort to getting my hands on some fake ID. I researched it, and me and Joanne got some. We only bought a ticket to one show, the first one, as we weren't sure if the phony proof would work. To help us in not being turned away I brought with me 'presents' for Patti. Patti's passionate stance on her personal favorite rock stars made her a target for the same kind of obsessions. We loved her; we could give her presents, she'd love them, and love us too. Joanne and I had christened ourselves in the New York rock scene with a few shows at CBGB. It was exciting to be there but we didn't see anyone special hanging out, and the groups were just ok. It was still better than Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Pink Floyd and other dreadful post-hippie rock stars that lost the plot which is what our fellow Elmonters were still listening and getting stoned to. We knew the Bottom Line would be more glitzy than CBGB, so we got dressed up a bit. Which meant, a bit outlandish. I had two presents with me: one for Patti, and one for Ivan. For Patti I had made a t-shirt with a drawing in paint of her beloved poet, Rimbaud. I had it done by the kid who painted the back of my denim jacket with a dazzling full color Brian Jones circa 1968. It was a great t-shirt. For Ivan I bought a long beautiful scarf. It was silky and fringed with lots of green, the color of Venus. We entered with no problem and I was psyched. I loved the Bottom Line I thought, and recognized that one of the waitresses was Ivan Kral's girlfriend Lynette.  I learned this from the magazine of course, and I was not at all jealous, even though I had a crush on him and would daydream about him. As far as I was concerned, I was a high school kid, and Ivan was a 'grown up', and a rock star in this counter-culture scene, outside the media. When I went up to her in a very friendly manner and asked if I was correct in that she was who she was, and could she bring my gifts backstage, she slowly looked me up and down, and replied, "Maybe," in a very snotty voice. I sat back down bewildered. She didn't snub me as if I was a kid, or an uncool person, she snubbed me as if I was a woman, and a threat. So for the first time honestly I began to think that I could...dream, really dream. After all I was completely innocent, a virgin wearing a smirk at her parents and a Brian Jones badge. I didn't in those days think of myself as ugly or unattractive, but being oppressed as I was by Elmont, and my parents and sister, my sexuality was in a cage. It would take years to fully recover from that cage. Many years. Some never do recover from having their sexuality and individuality oppressed in childhood and adolescence. To my advantage, I was very skinny, and my face was pretty, but then it was all just a shell. It 'worked' but had I been encouraged to be sexy and love myself, and be a woman, instead of fighting energies against me, I would probably have had the world in my hand come age 24, but this wasn't to happen.

When I saw Patti Smith's mom near the backstage door I went up to her and asked her if she could please bring my presents back. She did.  Moments later Ivan emerged in the club. I had a photo with me of him taken at the Central Park concert, by Michael, this was my chance to meet him.  Since Ivan's girlfriend had just unwittingly informed me that I was a woman, I stood up like a real girl, and called his name past about four tables, and he kept walking. I called again, and he turned with a big smile. He walked up to me half way, and we were immediately laughing and leaning into each other physically, he said, "Who are you?"

I answered, "I'm Roseann, I sent you back the gift. Can you sign this to me?"

I handed him the photo and he unsteadily leaned on his knee and asked me to spell my name and then he kissed me.

The lights went out and on stage came Ivan with my scarf which he tied around the mikestand, and Patti, followed by the other guitarist, Lenny Kaye, wearing the t-shirt I gave to Patti. I was very proud. The show was great and fantastic and we danced in our seats and on our feet. 

It gave me much joy to find out in the days afterward that Lenny had worn my t-shirt every single night of this historic career event of their stand at the Bottom Line, and for the finale of the last show Patti ripped the thing to shreds off of his back! I walked around Elmont High School as if I held the secret wonders of the universe. I'd speak to Lori and Michael a couple of times a week and they would inform me on anything happening at the nights out on the town that I'd missed. Michael it seems was cleaning tables at the other somewhat more intimidating night spot, Max's Kansas City. A few times a month Joanne and I would go out. We'd go to see Television at CBGB, shows that were incredibly packed where people would literally hang off the ceiling...and we'd get there early, late afternoon, and wait around all day to be let in. Lisa starting venturing out as her curiosity got the best of her. She would catch a show here and there, but then there was always the problem of the curfew. None of us were really allowed to stay out late, except for Joanne. So we would go to the shows, and then walk around the village all night. We'd leave CBGB at 4 am, and sit in a pizza place and at about 8 am we would get on the F Train home to Elmont, where we would arrive after the train and bus rides, at about 9.30. I'd enter my parents' house as chipper as I could fake and say simply that I slept over Joanne's house. It was always most exciting to go and see Johnny Thunder's at Max's. Max's was a bit harder to get into, it wasn't new and green and friendly like CBGB.  Thankfully the first time I went I was on the guest list for The Senders as the lead guitarist Wild Bill Thompson was from Long Island. He'd seen me at local blues jams on Long Island, which I went to as I was somehow influencing local musicians to get into the blues. Wild Bill dubbed me Roseann Mindbender, "the weirdest kid in  Elmont". As I was on the guest list I got in and was always let in after that. The 'scene' although vital and exploding was relatively small enough that people would remember you even after just one night of hanging out. It was a great feeling, especially for a 17 year old and at that time, being around some hip young adults who were of the post-hippie and bloody boring art-prog-rock times. The Johnny Thunders shows were incredible. He was the undisputed King of the New York Rock Scene, and during his opening number, Pipeline, an instrumental surf/punk cover, all of the tables up front would collapse. My new personal favorites were The Mumps. On Public Television in the early 70's a tv series called, "An American Family" aired and anyone and everyone watched it. It showed the slow break up of a large yet modern Santa Barbara family. My favorite character was Lance Loud, the flaming fag son who left California to live at the Chelsea Hotel. By 1977 he was established as the front singer of the band The Mumps, and while he wasn't as pretty as he was in 1973, he was actually a damn good singer and a very entertaining performer. Punk music was starting to get some attention in the media which worked as a window to my fellow Elmont students and my parents, as to what I was up to. The Sex Pistols hit the 6 o'clock news, and I bought Anarchy in the UK , their single, which I brought to school to play for Lisa on the library phonograph. We played it low with our ears to the speaker as we laughed and laughed. We laughed at the lyrics, we laughed at the Sex Pistols, and laughed at ourselves for loving it.

My next concert would be Patti Smith and Television at the Palladium, New Year's Eve, 1976.  I bought Ivan some more gifts but this time I went up to the management company in the city to drop them off during the day. They treated me fine, and assured me that Ivan would get everything, the gifts, plus my letter. I cannot remember what on earth I wrote to him, but I'm sure it was something that revealed my situation at home. The situation of a teenage girl on Long Island who was a black sheep in a loud Italian family, a girl who hated her school and was failing badly, and of course music having been the medicine for my soul since a small girl. Whatever it was that got to him, made him believe he could reach out to me with his own personal and professional complaints. He wore one of my gifts on the stage on New Year's Eve, and then notes and letters starting coming to Elmont, from him, where he lived with his girl friend on Bank Street. 

To say I "lived" for these letters would be an understatement. My parents were bewildered as to why this man would be writing to me, but they wouldn't dare ask questions, because that would give me a forum to speak.  To share my feelings, grow, be normal was a no-no in my case; they just wanted to strangle and stifle any more of what they perceived as weirdness from me, which it all was in their eyes. The fact that they were bewildered, and that I accepted this bewilderment shows how damaging they were. They couldn't consider that I was a young woman, a young attractive woman who may attract affection or romantic attention. On my dad's part it would just be silly protectiveness, yet on my mother's part it was just her own unhappiness with herself as a woman. They were however grateful that Ivan was alive though, instead of having me seemingly obsessed with someone who was dead.  The fan club for Brian Jones was actually expanding and expanding. A lot of older people, older than myself were missing Brian Jones, as he was not only dead, but his life was mysteriously being forgotten by the Rolling Stones themselves. It was a very unusual and suspicious way to behave regarding a former friend and fellow musician, and probably their second biggest mistake regarding him and the eventual discovery of his murder decades later. My fan club was still relatively small, but between my newsletters at Bleecker Bobs, and the fanzines which just consisted of poems and drawings relating to Brian Jones, xeroxed and stapled together, it went literally around the globe.

Although I could have been happy that someone I wanted to know was now writing me at my parents', I was not. I was growing up, and I was feeling more and more like a woman, and of course I was insatiable, for Ivan. I turned to poetry to express myself. I always kept up my journal writing as advised by Miss Thompson, but now Patti-style poetry was the thing. It was allowed to run the full gamut from proper to slang to obscene to holy and back to proper again. What a format. Of course my favorite subject was Ivan Kral, but I was walking around very depressed.  At school I was an enigma to the students as well as the teachers. My major, the business course was for a double class, and it included the head of the business department sitting at the front of the class working at her desk as our teacher dictated to us for shorthand, and timed us, and had us read our notes. Old Mrs. Gottlieb took a special liking to me and I have no idea why. It could be that she fancied that the nuttiest kid in the class was a Virgo which she was, and she appreciated my refreshing uniqueness. She thought I was pure comedy. At one point, Mrs. Medford, the dowdiest proper business woman that you can indeed imagine thought she would embarrass me by saying in front of the full quiet class between a stop watch break of Mrs. Gottlieb, "Excuse me, but we do not wear hats in class." She was referring to my ever present black beret.

"But I can't take it off!!!" I immediately informed her, then after a pregnant pause, I completed, "my hair is filthy!"

As the whole class laughed, some straight out loud, and some muffled, Mrs. Gottlieb nodded her head in double time with her lips apart in a smile at the somewhat taken aback Mrs. Medford, who looked down and went on with her work. Never was I asked to remove my beret again.

Pills continued to be a part of High School. Any pills that anyone could get from any member of their family would do just fine. My parents were too concerned with my cigarette problem to notice that my father's darvons were missing, or that all those bottles of phenobarbitol that we had gotten when my mother insisted that I was to be asthmatic, were gone. 

One particular day in the toilets of the school, our favorite meeting rooms, to smoke of course, and talk about the city loud enough so that any other girls could hear and feel as if they might be missing something, in came Carol. A skinny bright acquaintance, she told me that she had some "angel dust" and invited me to join her. It was right before shorthand class but I wouldn't dare say no. It had a pleasant sensation to it. I felt as though my mind was like a desert, it was completely empty, except for some softly blowing desert sands in a dusky pink light. There was no rock n roll, no city, no Elmont, just this desert and it was beautiful, and as Mrs. Gottlieb chattered away with her stop watch and other girls furiously scribbled in their books, I was drawing at half-time speed, big circles in my steno pad. It was lovely. I sat pretty up close to the front, no more than three feet away from the teacher, and I had a very slight worry that she would call on me to read back my notes, but she didn't and she did look at me though, and she must have seen me, and what I was doing. She would never worry about me though, she knew somehow that no matter what, I did not have what it takes to ever be a casualty. Very insightful of her.

The Summer of 1977 was a Summer where my dreams started to really fall apart. I thought for sure that when school was done and I was on my way to getting a job in the city that life would just begin to finally get good for me. Patti Smith Group played lots of shows that Summer and I was nearly at all of them. We would all arrive in the afternoon and hang out outside. Once when we were out there, in front of the Village Gate, sitting in the line, everybody started to yell for Ivan. I looked around from where I was sitting to find him standing in the street with a camera in front of his face. When he pulled the camera down he was looking right at me, smiling, and then he went into another position and took some more pictures of me, and then another and then some more, and then another, and I must have been turning all sorts of colors as he snapped away at me, from different angles. The crowd loved it and the crowd loved me for being there. When he was done embarrassing me, he came up to me and told me very up close, and in a sexy whisper in his eastern european accent to sell my tickets, that he'd put me on the guest list. I said, "ok". This was the time period when the rumor started that me, I, was Ivan Kral's girlfriend.  A rumor believed among fans, a rumor that Lynette did not like at all, even though she knew that Ivan and I were merely pen pals. You couldn't really blame her for hating me, after all she wasn't much to look at and time would reveal to me that she was nothing much in the personality department either, save a very affected phoniness, and she definitely was not an intellectual! At about 4 foot 11 with hair that was way too long for her height, she always reminded me of the TV show character Cousin It from the Addams Family. She had huge pendulous breasts that sagged like two huge bags of pizza dough, and she didn't have a nose. Ivan was in love with her though, it must have been their Taurus/Leo sun square, a terrible but compelling astrological aspect. She was however part Oriental, and that was where it held Ivan. He was obsessed with John Lennon and shared with him the desire for an Oriental woman.  I was young, very blonde now and thin with small perky breasts and big eyes, probably looking more Polish than Italian, and Ivan was very attracted to me. At another show Ivan came up to me outside at CBGB and as I was giving him a collage I made of Prague, complete with everything from steeples to crushing Russian tanks, he went in my bag and pulled out a full bottle of vodka that I was asked to hold for someone, and waved it up high for the whole line to see. I wrote sexy poems to Ivan. Lenny Kaye once teased me about them in front of the crowd. I met lots of interesting fans of theirs. I met the infamous David Peel, I met Sara Jones and Richard Sassin, who were the older crowd. We were 'the kids', but they were the actual friends of the band who were in their mid to late 20s who would get wrecked on drugs and sweat up front in front of their friends, the band, and pay glorious tribute during "Gloria" and wreathing in sweat during "Ain't It Strange". Sara was the girlfriend of Patti's brother Todd. Her and her friend Richard were the darlings of the latest incarnation of the New York underground scene which stemmed from the Factory and Andy Warhol.  I felt like a 'friend' also, after all Ivan wrote me letters, Patti came up to me in a club once during one of the last NY Dolls shows and asked if I had brought a coat with me because it was getting cold outside during the Winter months. Lenny constantly teased me about my dirty poems. Richard and Sara took a special liking to me. Even though they hung around with the band and some Studio 54 people like the clothing designer Halston, they gave me their home phone numbers when I didn't even ask for them. They would scream at me that I was in fact, Brian Jones, after whispering to each other! My social calling card was that I ran the "International Brian Jones Fan Club." Richard and Sara apparently thought I was possessed by Brian and it was true that I did seem to look more and more like him between my now bleached out gold hair, petite build, and newly acquired antique clothes making me look like a continental-style hippie. It was a very fun time, but nevertheless I was ever so slightly depressed. After all it wasn't me who got to kiss Ivan good night every night, and I was still living in Elmont with my parents, and I didn't just couldn't, have any kind of sexual relations with the boys in my home town. How could I be attracted to them after being in love with a communist beauty in a New York City underground rock band? Very unhealthy stuff.

Besides Joanne and Lisa who continued to be my friends, quite separately, I had a new friend. An odd woman who was living in Elmont named Stephanie. She was much older than me, and I met her in the corner deli. She was attractive but a bit overweight. She seemed stoned a lot, and had her own apartment right there in Elmont! It was the perfect place to hang out. She was a lesbian and a major Patti Smith fan and she was thrilled to have me as a friend, needless to say. It didn't intimidate me that she would occasionally speak about heroin either. Stephanie was a stay-at-home type, as much as she listened to Patti Smith non-stop she only seen Patti play a couple of times. Stephanie knew by my sexy poems and love for Ivan that there was no way I'd be interested in going to bed with her. We would just listen to music and smoke pot and she would get very stoned, and we'd talk a lot. Because she was a lesbian and I didn't want to be there with her alone I decided that I would tell Lisa and have her join us. If I have any regrets in my whole life, this most likely is the only one.  I wasn't worried about Lisa manifesting her butch behavior into full blown lesbianism, after all her father would kill her, but it took many years, nearly 20 years for me to realize that it was here that Lisa was introduced to heroin. I had to deal with her death and probing questions from her brother in law to go back in time and realize that.

Lisa would get there at Stephanie's apartment before me, and then I'd arrive to find them both unbelievably stoned, I'd say, "oh you two can't handle your pot, I can't believe it!" That's how naive I was. Perhaps the hair color was getting to my brain.

 My mother had decided that I was allergic years ago, so that it wouldn't be a good idea for me to go to any kind of beauty school. No, I was to use the secretary skills I learned and barely passed, and go out into the city and commute every single day on the subway and bus with the herd. It was ok that I failed my shorthand, I could always use my typing.  It's either that or if I would have done well on my final tests I could have gone to Nassau Community College and live at home for another few years, and learn how to drive and maybe they would lend me a car if they bought another one. All of this was conveyed to me in a manner that indicated they wished I didn't exist at all; a bit of a heartbreak, but one had to be strong or have a breakdown. Since the idea of my 'future' seemed all too complicated for them even as they complainingly explained my possible next moves, it was decided I'd go out to work. After all I graduated with a 65 average, meaning I just about got out. When they placed the SAT test in front of me I was thinking about who was playing at CBGB and treated the test like a baseball pitcher who "throws the game".

My first job in New York City was for a company that managed the credit card companies. Credit cards were still a small thing back in 1977.  There I befriended a meth-amphetamine freak woman in her 30's and she turned me on to a kind of speed called RPs. They were little green tablets that said RP and had the flat line on the other side. She could also get me crystal speed and liquid, her two favorites. I inquired on the scene about the RPs and they seemed to be very popular, a lot of people heard of them and said they were fantastic, much more superior to black beauties which were nasty. The green RPs were supposedly a psychiatric pharmaceutical to elevate the mood with virtually no side affect at all save a dry mouth. You wouldn't get jittery, you wouldn't get wired, you would just feel great and talk to absolutely everyone. After all I bore a resemblance to "Steph" in the Who's Quadrophenia movie, so it was time for me to do my mod thing for real. One tablet would get you buzzed and two would have you talking to everyone in the room, or in the subway  depending on where you are. My favorite thing to do was to take one just as me and Joanne would leave Elmont. She'd join me in this of course. So by the time we'd be on the subway we'd turn the subway into a party. "Excuse me, can I borrow a pen?  ---

Where are you going? We're going to the Village."

"Hi! What time does your watch say because I think mine might be slow."

"Joanne, go ask that guy over there where did he get his shoes."

When we would get to the club the next step would be to have some scotch and sodas. RPs and scotch and soda's became my diet for a good three months. I went down to 86 lbs., I had pimples all over my face, but even with that, my eyes were made tremendous and I looked great. There was only one problem with the RPs though: the come down. Speed crashes are famous and just because these pills weren't as bad, when it came to the crash it was still there. During these crashes I would get glimpses of reality. Reality being that maybe I was really living a stupid life. That I hadn't been so cool in High School after all. That maybe not going to the prom and having a local boyfriend might mean that I'd never marry, and never have kids, and after all, being a true romantic above everything else, that would be the ultimate failure. The reality that if I really loved music I'd play my guitar more often and write more than one song, or at least keep playing my Exile on Main Street songbook. The reality that Brian Jones was really a creep and never wrote a song anyway, but also that he might have been murdered, because, how on earth else did he really die?  I had compared all the statements of the witnesses of his death and nothing was fitting together. There was the reality that powerful people might know this and may not like me resurrecting him in public when no one else was. The reality that I'd never had sex. That it was just my "powers" that convinced more stable friends like Joanne and Lisa that I had a better 'time' than they did. That my parents and sister hated me. That my sister had made my parents hate me by being so good in school, that my parents made my sister hate me by pointing out that I wore striped satin pants late at night and would go see the same 'weirdo' movies like the film Performance, up to 30 times and boast about it. The reality that although my cousin Ro who was my age was intrigued to no end with my adventures, that she probably wouldn't trade places with me. The reality that I could actually die from these pills mixed with the scotch and soda, and then it would look like my family was right that I was all "wrong". All of these thoughts would come down on me hard during these speed crashes. At 8 a.m., riding the subways with the side doors opened that separated the cars as it sped through the tunnels loudly, faster baby faster. One night in Brooklyn staying at Loris as I was crashing I went blind. I wasn't even scared, I was laughing, "Lori, I can't see, I'm blind!! hahahaha!" She was straightening my hair for me and was very concerned, but I said it would be alright, and thank God it was. I started to have to take more than one or two RPs to get as high. I went to three, then to five. My heart was breaking, I had no love. Just letters from Ivan Kral whom I was so infatuated with. And just rock n roll, and drugs.

On the night of November 19, 1977 I took six RPs. I swallowed them one by one. I had them kept in my little gold pillbox. I was at a friend's house on 13th Street. There were a few people over including Michael and Lori, and Joanne from Elmont. I ceremoniously placed them in my mouth one by one as Michael watched. When I got up to the fourth one his eyes widened, when I took the fifth he got up and calmly yelled, "Do you know what you're doing??" He looked over at Lori, who waved her hand with a cigarette and made a disgusted sound. I protested his concern and said that I have to take more now, that my body is used to it so don't worry. I took the final one and Michael sat down as Joanne laughed and the apartment's occupant, our friend Diane, looked concerned quietly standing over everyone and staring at me. Half of us were going to the Bottom Line that night. We were to see a band called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  It was something different to do. We saw a pictured ad in the daily newspaper and they were from Florida and Los Angeles, and he looked cute and different looking to all of us so we thought we would take a break from the New York underground scene and see something slightly different. No one ever heard a single song by the band except Lori, who had their album and said it was good, real good. We set off for the show. On the way there I noticed something was happening to me, in that nothing was happening to me, just that I was getting very depressed. We got there and we were escorted to a table right up front since we were predominantly young girls. My depression deepened and then I noticed that Ivan's girlfriend Lynette was working that night and sitting around with her table of friends. She began pointing at me and laughing. I felt horrible. What would she be saying?  "You see that girl, she writes to my boyfriend." The place began to fill up to sold out capacity and the audience was the entire underground New York rock scene! We thought we'd never see any of them there! What would they be doing there? And when it was spotted that us, the 'kids' were there!  We were regarded by our elders with admiration for our rock n roll savvy.  There and then they were all squinting suspicious eyes that somehow screamed, "traitors!"  My eyes were huge, my mouth was dry, I looked beautiful in my turquoise silk wrap around blouse but I felt horrible, and I felt violent. I went into the ladies toilet and in big black permanent marker wrote on this nightclub wall, the nightclub that I was so happy to be in just a year before, a nightclub that I was so honored to be let in to, a night club that was clean and well painted in a pastel for the toilet. I was one suffering sick baby as I took out my big black marker and wrote, what else? Brian Jones Lives. When I went back to my seat, trying to ignore the laughing and staring from Lynette's table, I took my knife out and leaned over the table and said to Lori and Joanne, "I'm going to kill her, I really am. I feel terrible, I'm going to cry right here, I hate all these people in here, I can't believe they're all here."
"Put away the knife Roseann, you're okay," said Lori.

I put it away and I was scratching my head. When you take amphetamines your scalp feels all fuzzy-numb, you scratch at it and it's like a massage you don't really feel your head, just this sensation. I scratched my head and arched my back and stretched around and I saw Ivan Kral waving and smiling frantically in the back trying to get my attention.  Waving with one arm outstretched high and with his other hand he was scratching his head to imitate me and he was laughing. I looked right at him, and I looked right through him. I turned my head back away towards the stage, and then the lights went out, thus giving Ivan Kral his first reason to hate Tom Petty.

As the band took the stage in the dark you could see that they were from the suburbs by the way they dressed. Not that it was bad or anything, you could just tell, and then in the dark gleamed a cigarette from under a sheen of blonder than blond long hair. The audience was mainly silent save an odd obligatory applause. The lights shone on this Tom Petty character.  He was no golden California boy with a smile and good  nature. No sir. He was a brooding character in black velvet tight pants and high heeled boots.  His teeth were too big for his mouth, his eyes were small but very blue and intense and pretty, but he was pure Plutonian. Plutonian as in Scorpio (his rising sign), Plutonian as in: I'll blow your fucking head off David Johansen; Plutonian as in: the future belongs to me baby and maybe you'll all learn something tonight, if only that; Plutonian as in: I can have all you girls tonight and you'd love it; Plutonian as in: I will have you swallow my boot if you ever think you could even think that I'm not the most talented bastard in this room.  Tom Petty and that energy was the only medicine in the world that could save me from dying that night (or killing someone!) He bit through his lyrics:

"...Why won't somebody say what's going on? Uh oh,

I think I been through this before...if 2 is 1 I might as well

be 3. It's good to see you think so much of me. Looks

like I've been fooled again, looks like I've been fooled

again. I don't like it."

He screamed. He eyed every girl in the audience as he sung the dark moody songs from his first album. He went from girl to girl with his Plutonic gaze and they all looked away, until he got to me. My gaze was not a gaze at that point of course, it was two beautiful black pools of light that wouldn't quit, that wouldn't even blink - because of the drugs!!  Tom Petty couldn't dare be the one to look away, so he had to do so with a chuckle. Funny enough, it was actually the only time he smiled, that is until at the very end of the show, when he knew he'd "won" by being fantastic.  

He finished the show on a different note with a song about an American girl. It showed a different side of him, a side that revealed that he really was a performer and able to change his mood and vibe. I picked out the lyrics, they were very nice, as well as passionate about a girl's passion, and I didn't know at the time but soon, and in all the years that would follow, I would live out the lyrics.

Chapter 5

"To be in this lifetrap with all the other fools..."