SHOPKEEP: Saturday in the Park

An excerpt from the upcoming memoir Shopkeep, a draft of which cools in the drawer before we start taking it apart and putting it back together again later this year. I suspect we’ll bring it out late next year as part of the Loose Lucy’s 30 year anniversary PR push.

This is one of the last pieces I wrote. It is the story of an angel and a song. Bonus: it’s a story of a dreamlike time when I was a musician!

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Saturday in the Park

It’s spring 1979.

I’ve spent a couple of years learning to play the saxophone. Despite a lack of natural musical ability I’ve become reasonably competent at it. It’s eighth grade—how proficient is one supposed to be on the cusp of fourteen?

Proficient enough that I play in the jazz ensemble, an offshoot group from the regular concert band. I will participate in these ‘acts’, along with the much more dramatic Marching Pride, throughout high school.

I look back in amazement—if I ever dreamed of being a musician onstage, it must have already come true, because I once soloed in a spotlight before a crowded gym. I felt the thrill of the group mind taking hold and making music with others locked in the groove. But like many magical episodes of my life, some of which I didn’t recognize at all in the moment, being a musician now seems like a faraway dream.

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Mr. Price, our dedicated band director, one lionized throughout our state as one of the best, booked our group to play for an educator’s conference in Columbia, at a high rise hotel (high for our little town, anyway) whose name escapes me—I think on Assembly Street. We caravan in a variety of vehicles, one driven by my friend Alan’s father. Alan’s sister Diane, a high school girl, also rides along.

Diane is interesting to me—she looks a little different. Her hair seems odd. What I don’t know is that Diane is in recovery from cancer, and she wears a wig because her hair’s fallen out from the treatment.

We play for the ballroom of teachers, take a break so they could make their speeches. We are all told to reconvene in a half-hour to get ready to play the second set.

Diane takes me aside. “Hey, you want to go have some fun with me?”

“Sure,” I reply. I loved, and love, women. Anytime one wants to hang with me, I’m there. I have no idea what she means, but who cares? She’s cute.

“Come on,” she says, and her eyes flash in a manner I can’t parse.

We take an elevator upstairs. She stands close to me. Looks up into my eyes. “Maybe we can find an open room.”

My heart begins pounding—what is happening, exactly?

The next thing I know, Diane’s leading down the deserted hallway on the top floor of the hotel. At the end of the corridor, in an alcove by a pair of decorative potted plants and a generic painting of some flowers, she turns me around and puts her lips on mine.

I have no idea what to do in response.

I let my arms hang. I was in shock—then her tongue finds its way into my mouth! Not truly knowing how to respond, I poke back at it with mine. Little do I realize, but in an instant I have experienced what in the old days people called ‘french’ kissing.

We continue for a few minutes. I can’t say I am aroused by it—too sudden, too shocking. Smacking, wet, sweet kisses.

Next thing I knew we are back downstairs just in time for me to get my horn out and my reed wet. I have no memory of what we played, how we sounded. Only of the elevator ride. And the kiss.

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On the drive home, we sit in the back seat, and she is next to me. I try to hold her hand, but she won’t.

She whispers, “Don’t do that in front of my dad.”

Not knowing what to think, I don’t tell anyone what happened, not even my best friend Jason. Mind, blown.

The next day at school, I walk around in a daze, trying to figure out what happened the previous night. Were Diane and I some kind of couple, now? But, she was three years older than me. I was still in eighth grade, for god’s sake. Further, at any given moment I was in love with either Charlotte or Susie. I had no clue what to do with any of this.

None of it may have made sense, but the memory of a first kiss like mine already vibrated with a resonance of mystery and meaning, like an initiatory rite, that extends to the writing of these words almost forty-two years later. Okay—that happened, but what a ‘that.’

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A few days go by. On Saturday, the family heads back oer to Columbia to shop and eat out as usual, and I buy a couple of 45s, including ‘Saturday in the Park’ by Chicago. I hadn’t been familiar with that tune, one Mr. Price, a fan of bands with horns, mentioned as a favorite. When I hear it, finally, I agree.

Back home in the living room, I close the door and I play my little record. I feel gripped by its melody and message of a carefree afternoon in a park, and with a horn section. For a brief moment, ‘Saturday in the Park’ seems like the greatest song I’ve ever heard.

I play it again and again, castigating myself for not having known this material, four or five years old at this point, which at my age seems an eternity and makes me feel an abject and pernicious fool for not having had familiarity this masterful musical text before now.

The phone rings. My dad comes in with it. He has an impish smile. “It’s a girl.”

“Who?”

He shrugged.

Diane.

We talk, awkward, for a few minutes. And it’s over.

I don’t remember the call well. My mind was blown yet again at having a sixteen year-old girl calling me. I had written the kissing episode as a bizarre anomaly—how could I pursue a relationship with her? For all sorts of reasons? I am still only thirteen.

We would have a few more conversations, but we would never repeat the make-out session, nor have a relationship at all, really. If I recall correctly, when I got to high school the next year, she didn’t seem to be around much.

It doesn’t matter—I have never forgotten her, nor the feel of her lips and tongue against mine, my lovely, ephemeral cancer girlfriend. Wherever you are, Diane, know that you are loved by me. You are like the story of the girl in the white dress on the Staten Island Ferry in Citizen Kane—a season has yet to pass in the last forty years in which I have not thought with warm affection of our ride in the elevator, and the walk down the silent hotel hallway, the soft sound of our shoes on the carpet, the swish-swish sound of the black dress pants I wore, the clammy palm you took in yours. Bless you, angel.

And, as confusing as it all was, I now understand her gentle seduction of me—you didn’t know how long you would live. A cute and funny boy next to you caught you eye, and you wanted to kiss him—and so you did.

Diane offers us a good life lesson here—this trip is short. And when you know time is short, how will you choose? I’m gonna be like Diane. I choose the kiss.