1979

Taken by Dana in her little bedroom off the kitchen.

I was walking up Central Park West between 87^th and 88^th street the first time I saw Belinda. It was 1978, and it hit me hard. She hit me hard. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and in the most devastating, Jewish, left-wing, bittersweet way. From that day on it was all about Belinda. The real of her, the ghost of her, the idea of her. She was my small, smooth, brown, white whale, and I was her pony-tail Ahab in a beat-up, brown corduroy suit coat and a blue Chairman Mao cap always on my head. The cap had a little red and gold Ho Chi Minh pin clipped to the crown that my mother had brought back from Hanoi in 1971 when she and a few of the hardcore peace ladies had been invited by our nation’s enemies to drop on by and say hello. The pin wasn’t intended for 6-year-old me, but 15-year-old 1978 me had no trouble identifying it as an important cultural artifact and crucial late 70s fashion accessory.

She really was absurdly beautiful, dear Belinda, with her full gypsy mouth and at 14, already broken beyond repair. She was gentle in the worst way, especially for her. And once I saw her she lodged in my conscious and unconscious in a most relentless fashion.

This was unfortunate because I already had a wonderful girlfriend at the time. Her name was Dana, and looking back with thirty-six years-worth of god knows what, she may have been even more beautiful than Belinda. Dana had strawberry blond hair and eyelashes to match, a small, wide, wistful face. The underline of her jaw was just ridiculous, especially with her head thrown back. Her green eyes were kind and went all the way to the bottom of the well. They gave you everything, but still held a little something back for themselves, and she was sexy, sexy, sexy in the most aching and organic 15-year-old way. She had those mystery freckles, the kind of freckles you have to be up real close to see, and soft light downy hair on her upper lip you had to be even closer for. And her mouth, her tiny, curious mouth. Every kiss was a question and every answer was good. It was all real, real good, and she spoke calmly in her soft but throaty voice, sincere and unsure all at once, and it hit my ear just right.

It was the fall of 1978, and I used to skip progressive school soccer practice, and we’d walk from 88th street on the building side of Central Park West to 95^th and Columbus where Dana lived in a small apartment with her half-hippie mom in one of those projects for white folks that had recently sprung up all over the upper Westside.

Dana had a tiny bedroom off the kitchen that was supposed to be some kind of breakfast nook, I guess. It didn’t even have proper doors, just floor to ceiling slatted shutters that gave the illusion of the illusion of privacy. She’d put Bob Dylan or the Persuasions on the living room stereo with no prompting from me and we’d go into her bedroom and figure it out all afternoon.

She smelled good. She smelled like the first one, and she was, but I didn’t tell her that ‘cause I was proud and fifteen and too foolish to know that if I just looked her in the eye and said “that was it, you’re it, you’re the first, I may never be whole, but I’m surely more whole than I’ve ever been before,” if I could have just told her that, she probably would have loved me even more. But she loved me pretty good anyway. She called me Tom and I liked the way she said it.

Dana had actually gone out for a bit with my buddy Mitchell the year before. He was her first. Mitchell was two years older than us. I’m still close with Mitchell, and he’s in Paris right now complaining about his family to French people instead of complaining about them to me, specifically his older brother Fred who I have my own very interesting and compelling history with but that’s a whole other thing that has a very strong mid to late 80s flavor, but in 1976, when I showed up for 9^th grade at the Walden school on the upper Westside of a whole other Manhattan, Mitchell was there too, showing up for 11^th.

Turned out his dad had just died in his arms of a heart attack after an argument, so he was a little frayed around the edges. The lone upshot was that this had given him some kind of pre-trust fund, monthly stipend travel allowance and we bonded deeply at the Empire Diner on 86^th street, where after telling me I could have anything I wanted, I proceeded to order a tuna-fish sandwich AND silver dollar pancakes, blowing his mind for good and letting him know I was a force to be reckoned with. This bit of mythology is brought up nearly every time we eat together, which we do a lot.

That happened in October 1976 in a New York City where white boys didn’t walk on Amsterdam unless they meant business or their parents gave them 50 cents mugging money to appease the gods. Mitchell and I also had quite a history together as far as our early romantic lives were concerned for we not only had Dana in common (though their thing was brief), we also had the twins in common, for you see Belinda had a twin sister named Gretchen and they were like a pair of Siamese cats, and famous teenage beauties as far down as the Museum of Natural History and all the way up to the Eldorado on 90th.

When I moved in with Belinda halfway through 11^th grade with the blessing of her clearly insane parents, it was only nine months or so before Mitchell moved in right across the hall with Gretchen, though Belinda and I had the park view.

So, there we were, him nineteen, a proud high school drop-out, and me seventeen, a prouder high school drop-out but still going to school a few hours a week, and both of us living there in this sprawling apartment that took up the entire third floor of 271 Central Park West at 87th.

Belinda’s dad (who was going deaf and sat at the piano night after night with Beethoven delusions) used to hand us a blank check and send us to do the family shopping at the Key Food on 92^nd and Broadway where we would somehow spend 300 late 70s dollars on god knows what to feed the privileged and hungry masses.

And that’s how it seemed life would be forever. Easy and effortless with all the perks of adulthood and none of the responsibilities. The taxis would be 75 cents for the first sixth of a mile for eternity. A two-bedroom apartment on 103^rd and Broadway, never more than 400 bucks a month, and we wouldn’t even mind that the movies were only as good as Heaven Can Wait and Midnight Express and not quite Network or Dog Day or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We’d be generous like that, ‘cause everything was still possible, and whatever we wanted to do would get done. It was 1979, and cocaine was good for you and there would still be plenty of time to take life seriously, it was just a matter of when we decided to flip that switch.

But let’s get back to Dana…

Do you know how incredibly powerful and profoundly deceiving it is to be young and impressionable and attend a school where you can just stop going to geometry because it doesn’t hit you quite right, and then spend your afternoons smoking reasonably strong brown pot with seeds and having tender, black market fifteen-year-old sex with your first love-- to hold that piece of innocence in your hands, a pure revelation of desire and discovery?

A passion of the 70’s, not in any way desecrated or stained by internet pornography, a pure and original sex composed by the two of us out of the primordial childhood ooze, and none of it colored by a parade of computer images, ideas born of a dark and death-fetishizing 21^st century world, a digital, soul sucking world, at your teenage beck and call 24 hours of every single day!

I feel bad for kids who grew up with access to all that, and as bad as I’ve wanted to be all grown up from the minute I was born, and as much as late 70’s New York City provided that opportunity, we still were innocent compared to the kids of today. Innocent not in what we did, but in what inspired what we did. Our imaginations were still homemade back then. No start up kits, no diagrams.

It was all too good, too pure, too much. 1979 was too perfect a blueprint. I didn’t know what I had, especially when it came to Dana, and what happened between me and her wasn’t about a period of time, it was about me and who I was.

I was careless and unkind with a girl I really cared for and who really cared for me. I didn’t mean to be, but I was. A beautiful, smart, soulful, 10^th grade girl who comes over to give you a blow job when you have Mononucleosis is a rare and precious thing and she deserves to be treated with honor and respect. And I didn’t do that. I saw Belinda walking on Central Park West and that was that, and Dana grew smaller and smaller, until it was basketball season, and I wasn’t missing those practices for anyone.

By the fall of ‘78 Dana had moved to Colorado, and in the spring of ‘79 I found myself somehow miraculously free from my flammable mother and living a block from school on Central Park West with Belinda. A year later she caught me talking to Dana on the phone, telling her I was sorry and I had made a terrible mistake.

Belinda threw me out and I had no choice but to go back to the home I had first fled, and I was so sad and lost I could only eat French Toast and not even with syrup, just blueberry jam.

Finally, Belinda forgave me and I moved back in with her, but it was too late for everybody by then, and soon it would be the 80s and I would come to the ghastly, flat light of Los Angeles and then that stuff happened, and then the 90s and the opium wars and dirty, lovesick money, and then the millennium and my screen-writing career got brain cancer, which could only be cured with open heart surgery and then more stuff happened and now it’s now.