HOW I CHANGED

FROM WAY OUT THERE

HOW I CHANGED

Faulty memory makes good memoir. It was “Wooden Ships,” not “Four Dead in Ohio.” My world view must have shifted prior to Kent State rather than later. It rehabilitates me: not money made me see myself a creature driven and derided by vanity, but brutality—in those deaths, close to home.

Crosby Stills Nash & Young at Boston Garden and a flashy blazer, bright yellow tie, a beautiful woman, blond bouffant, regal for front-row seats. Her ermine, her silks, her red dress, shoulders glossy under dizzying spotlights. I drove a freezer truck to Cape Cod’s best restaurants, and in Boston in suits stood out front of major theaters directing folk lining a block for Midnight Cowboy, Zabriskie Point, and who knows what else now faded into the bye and bye, though I watched a hundred times. When I got bored, I smoked Galois at a distance from other assistant managers; I preferred Jean-Louis Trintignant.

I could just afford Boston Garden. I was the guy with the babe cold as luscious snow, hot as steel strings. Heads turned, jaws went slack. We were ushered to wooden seats not ten feet from the stage by a white-haired man in white gloves; we were more the show than their mellifluous voices warning of a gentle lost future which meant little they sounded so good, and I was much the shiny dude down front with a voluptuous prize, a racetrack beauty, diva of cocktail parties, the future Wife of Bath.

Then the lights dimmed, the stage ready. Someone came for a sound check, joke, or the introductions. We were in hardwood seats, yes, but in the direct shadow of the greatest singers so no problem really, seats worthy of extravagance. Just then “Wooden Ships . . .” —it must have been. How could I have known the events recorded in “Four Dead in Ohio” and still strut about in such clothes and blonds of vanity? The lights went out and twenty or thirty, perhaps a hundred smoky, dirty, bare-foot, big-haired people rushed to sit on the floor and fill the front of the stage, the aisles, front rows, and they squatted right beside me.

Memory is conspiratorial, as was the cherubic smile of the person closest to me. A boy or a girl? Someone my age. Dressed like the others, long greasy hair—and happy—they were all so happy. My money was wasted. I turned from them to the glistening body beside me and didn’t know who she was. Laughing and stretching out along the floor were the only people I ever wanted to know.