Well, let's see if this accepts everything. I'm reposting stuff from the beginning to June 23, since the archives broke down around then and lots of stuff was lost. So, before we go on, I thought I'd just repost it. Just scroll down to the bottom where it says 4.15:
[ Mon Jun 23, 01:44:03 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Before I lose them again, here are two URL's:
http://www.mithrilstar.org/imladris/kerista.htm
http://www.toryfolliard.com/profiles.asp?artist=Munch
The first one is an article about an old San Francisco commune called Kerista and the second one MIGHT be examples of my friend Charles' art - the style looks similar.
About Kerista - Mary's last letter mentioned it, because C&J were trying to talk her into joining. I remember they came to C&J's house for a recruitment meeting. All of our little Door County counterculture group was there. I remember Brother Jud. All I could think at the time was, what a con man. He had a beard and very piercing eyes, and practiced some kind of confrontational psychology - there was a term for it and I can't remember it - it's in the Kerista article, and if I go there now, I'll lose what I've written so far here - but, as the author of the article says, another word for it is haranging (sp?). The whole thing looked like a very scary proposition to me. There was the idea of polyamory - but you had little or no choice about whom you would sleep with - it had to be a different person in your little group every night. There was little or no individuality. It was an experiment in group mind. The group would make most if not all of one's decisions for them. Several folks were interested. My ex-husband and I were definitely not. I don't know if anything got off the ground in Door County. We sold the farm and left them and each other not too much later. I remember beginning to question some of their ideas, and was immediately told that I was being negative and was not a good influence in the group. I thought that was good. I left.
[ Thu Jun 19, 02:11:01 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
October 15, 1978...Another letter. She chides me. I have not been in touch. Did not tell her I was moving into the blue gingerbread Victorian. My phone disconnected. She is alarmed. But she calls the painter and his wife, and they give her the lowdown. So she writes.
My husband and I are semi-officially separated. This begins the period where I sleep in one bedroom, he sleeps in another, I have an affair with the guy in the back apartment, he has an affair with my (new) best friend from school, who is about 15 years younger than either of us. We all hang out together. The kids are with both of us. Strange days, indeed. No wonder I have no time to write.
[ Wed Jun 18, 02:52:24 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
8.28.78 - Still on my farm in Door County. Postcard from Mary in England. Shepherds and Sheep, Detain from Window XVII, King's college Cambridge. "Quite lovely and we even punted which was hysterical! Return today amid all the tight security at London." Don't remember - IRA stuff? Actually, not still on the farm. Postcard forwarded from farm to 426 S. Webster. A beautiful blue gingerbread Victorian house. My soon to be ex-husband and I moved in there with every intention of buying it and sharing it. There was a separate apartment in the back. The children could go back and forth. No money to do the place justice, however. And the farm did not sell in time to buy the house. It burned down a few years after we left there, and we were only there for a year or so, if that. There are stories, however.....
[ Tue Jun 17, 06:23:00 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
November 3, 1979 - I am in Seattle. With a new boyfriend. After riding from Green Bay, WI to Seattle on the back on his '69 Harley Sportster. I sent her a picture. "My dear, you look such a dyke" :) I think this is the letter that firmly decided me not to "experiment" with lesbianism. I had no real interest in it. My only interest was the possibility that I got along with my women friends so well, and my relationships with men seemed to go so wrong so quickly. But listening to Mary's adventures, I discovered that emotional relationships are emotional relationships, no matter who or where or what. I wouldn't be gaining anything. After a beautiful recital of the beginning of a love affair, and the disastrous end of same, she writes:
"Well, Barbara of the Big City, is that how it goes then? Or is it only in those old English/middle French medieval texts that such things happen and bound as we are by the realities of the time we live in, there is no place for such illusions. Seems like a lot of what therapy is about is giving up the illusions that we all carry about what we can/can't get from people - those primal desires which were never satisfied for us. However, I don't want to give All of them up. There has to be another level to reality other than reality itself. Maybe I'm just too much of a romantic to see/deal with things as shitty as they usually are. Well, we are both out of our time - you, my dear, are an Elizabethan through and through, definitely of Shakespeare's time methinks - me, well, I always see myself as around the time of Byron/Shelley surrounded by all those dying love poems...male though, not female, otherwise I'll end up sitting around being read too rather than doing the reading..."
Is it any wonder I miss her?
[ Tue Jun 17, 03:37:13 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Looks like I'm going on a Mary kick for a few days. The next pile of things seems to be a pile of letters. Actually, I just found a woman with her name in Amherst, MA, and sent her a card by snail mail, with my phone number & stuff. Could be.....
Let's see - this one is dated September 3rd, and there are references to my being in school, so this must be 1978, since I graduated in 1979. I am apparently still on the farm, but I am thinking about leaving. My memory of that fall is a little hazy. I was probably disoriented, broke and confused. See below...
She has been gone for a year, going to school at Goddard in MA, separating from her husband, and just beginning to deal with being a lesbian. She is just back from visiting her parents and sister in England, very disoriented, broke, and confused about her future. Sounds like she's right on track for 1978!
I hope the woman in Amherst is her. I hope she answers me.
Wonder where tomorrow's letter will take me?
[ Mon Jun 16, 05:42:45 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Just realized I wrote about the Sheriff's receipts already. Just picked up the same bits again, and at least got a little more story squeezed out of 'em. Rearranged my stack of stuff so that they are in two different places - onward into the flotsam...
2.21.81 - Amherst, MA - letter from Mary, addressed to me in Pittsburgh, where I am attending graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh on a teaching assistantship. I am, if memory serves me right, about a month away from my "on the bus" Dead show. Graduate school will go the way of the dinosaurs. Or was that me, going the way of the dinosaurs? Mary is thinking about going into business for herself (she's a therapist), leaving the feminist collective (CIRCA) she has been involved with. Reagan is in the White House. She's thinking of becoming a citizen (she's a Scot - technically, a Brit). "I have a fear I'll be deported some day."
[ Mon Jun 16, 02:58:44 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
06.06.84 - a little more than 19 years ago - two receipts from the Brown County Sheriff's Office for a total of 388.50 in payment of bond for the NGB. My only excuse is that he hadn't hit me yet. I think I was trying to prove what a great old lady I was. I mean, I had a degree in intellectual history - magna cum laude, in fact - but I guess I needed some kind of reassurance that I was a success as a human being as well, and that perhaps I deserved being treated well. I wanted him to consider himself very lucky that he had me. I think he did. So much so that he didn't want me to leave the following year, and tried to beat my head into the ground. I seem to remember another time when I tried to throw a knife out the window. It hung up in the windowsill on the screen, but that action in itself broke up his impulse that had considered using it, so it wasn't an entirely useless action. I'm not trying to make any excuses for him (we were pretty drunk both of these times, and these incidents were not the usual thing in my relationships), but I did know and perhaps he suspected that I had picked him out of the crowd because he had a nice bike and he was single. And he was a nice guy most of the time. Nobody deserves getting their heads banged into the ground or threatened with a knife. It's also true that no one deserves to be bamboozled into falling in love with someone who is only trying to prove herself as a worthy human being, and who likes your bike.
[ Mon Jun 09, 02:13:13 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Moving ahead a couple of years, it is 1980, and I believe I am in Seattle for the first time, receiving a card from my friend Vicki - a beautiful card, dated 2.26.80 - with a wonderful picture of a woman in a clown suite, wearing a green hat, and a face composed of the night sky, also reflected around her, but with a rainbow in the center. She holds a mask of a beautiful woman's face. The card reads, "If you're afraid of the dark...remember the night rainbow."
Vicki was the most stylish woman I knew in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She was a very singular woman, and I felt lucky to count her as a close acquaintance, not to mention the possiblity of actual friendship. I admired her very much. She looked like she should be CEO of some very successful company, dressing in vintage clothing that she always made look like the very latest thing, and very uniquely her own at the same time. She talks in the card about dancing, both teaching and doing. Dance was what she wanted to do most in the world.
I saw her again a year or so later when I was back in Green Bay to pick up a car, I think. That's another story. I went to a wedding reception for somebody I don't remember and she was there. She had joined the army. I didn't get a chance to talk with her for long. I haven't heard from her since. I hope she found someplace to dance.
[ Fri Jun 06, 02:58:23 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Wheeee------into the wayback machine-----------the year is 1978. I'm still married. To my second husband. But not for long. My daughter is 2. My son is 11. I am the central figure in a very large painting by Charles Munch entitled "6 Women". I am laying in the basic Venus position on a bench, although I do not resemble Venus in the least. Far too skinny. My friend the aforementioned Mary is the figure to the far right. My dear friend Marion, who I must believe to be dead by now, or in her 80's or 90's somewhere, is lying on the floor. I can't remember the name of the woman to the left, but I do remember her. I can see her smiling. My friend, who I worked with at the nursery, is there. Sue painted incredibly beautiful flowers. Ice cream colored flowers, I think I called them in a poem I wrote for her.
I remember posing for this picture. Oh, did I mention - we're all nude. My friend Charles, the painter (he won the top money prize at Wisconsin '78 for this painting, for which I have the brochure with a b&w photo of the painting on the opening page), is/was tall, rather ascetic looking, blonde. He made me lie on this hard bench. No, I couldn't have anything soft underneath me because it would throw the balance of the pose off just ever so much. My elbow is resting on the hard bench. It hurt. I think that's Charles' wife bending over in front of me, grabbing her ankle.
I'm still rather at a loss of the point of the painting. A statement by the Juror, one Ellen Lanyon, painter, of Chicago and New York, says: "Realism, surrealism, mysticism, fantasism, cubism, color conceptualism, constructivism, non-objectivism, opism, popism, optimism and narration..." What! Not Narrism? Can't remember another such string of isms in one place. She is "impressed with the impact of the environment, myth and the desire to communicate a sense of place or state of condition in most of the works." I still don't get it. I think I'm dense. I just liked helping out a friend and being in a big painting with a lot of other friends. I never see these people anymore. I am happy to know we are all still together somewhere.
[ Thu Jun 05, 11:37:50 AM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Now here's a soap opera in a paper bag. ON a paper bag, actually. A little note. Don't know why I have it. Don't know why I kept it. It reads:
"Tommy, I didn't want to wake you up again! I decided to walk. Give me a call later. See ya. Joy."
Tommy was one of the bikers living in the trailer in my back yard for awhile. Joy was just a friend, I think. The note smacks of promises (a ride home?), a late night party?, a liason? What, what? There are all the ingredients here for a short story. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it. I'm already writing another story. I should send it to my writer's group. Actually, here I go to do just that.......
[ Wed Jun 04, 02:13:52 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Linda was the first person I visited in prison. Not that I made a career out of it. I think I visited an NGB (no-good-boyfriend), and then my friend Kevin, but that story comes much later on. I didn't even know her very well. She was the girlfriend of a guy who was a brother to a very good friend of ours (my boyfriend and me). We never liked him. He was into hard drugs - heroin, dilaudid. He had a scam running with the local dentists where he'd visit the dentist with his honestly terrible horrible very bad teeth, get a scrip for a pain killer (dilaudid), make an appointment to get the teeth fixed, and never show up. He'd go from dentist to dentist this way, until he was blacklisted with nearly every dentist in northeastern Wisconsin. Linda was a sweet pretty waitress who did the drugs too, but was basically a very nice person. It's possible that prison was the best thing that ever happened to her, although I really hate saying things like that when I've only been a visitor. What the hell do I know about what it was like or what she could have done for herself without it. Anyway, her NGB would go so far as to show my boyfriend naked pictures of her and try to arrange for a swap, which basically would have caused me to stick my finger down my throat and say "gag me with a spoon" if that phrase were available then. Don't remember when it first came on the scene. My not nearly as bad NGB wouldn't go for it.
I don't know how many more of these letters there are. This last letter says she'll be out in November, and she "intends on dragging you out to party!" I left for Seattle in September.
[ Tue Jun 03, 04:07:04 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
LPH by John Cougar Mellencamp. I just looked it up to be sure, and found the lyrics, which I might as well post since I got 'em:
Pink Houses
There's a black man with a black cat livin' in a black neighborhood
He's got an interstate runnin' through his front yard
You know he thinks that he's got it so good
And there's a woman in the kitchen cleanin' up the evenin' slop
And he looks at her and says, "Hey darlin', I can remember when
you could stop a clock."
CHORUS:
Oh but ain't that America for you and me
Ain't that America somethin' to see baby
Ain't that America home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me
There's a young man in a t-shirt
Listenin' to a rockin' rollin' station
He's got greasy hair, greasy smile
He says, "Lord this must be my destination."
'Cause they told me when I was younger
"Boy you're gonna be president."
But just like everything else those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went
CHORUS
Well there's people and more people
What do they know know know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico
Ooh yeah
And ther's winners and there's losers
But they ain't no big deal
'Cause the simple man baby pays for the thrills, the bills,
the pills that kill
CHORUS
[ Tue Jun 03, 04:01:43 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Just another letter from Linda in prison written on stationary designed by the no good boyfriend (doing his own sweet time elsewhere) that has the Harley eagle wtih a skull and Viking helmet in the center. I think I liked it at the time. Smacks a little bit of Aryan Nation now. Don't know if he was into that. Green Bay bike club made strange (I want to say bedfellows here, but that could give a wilder impression than was actually the fact - only one of the "club" guys was actually a bedfellow). I did get drunk with the President of the club (leaving it nameless for the time being) one night, and he did in fact sleep with me, but that was only sleep. More specifically, passed out. First time I found out I snored.
The Pres was an ex-Nazi. I was an ex-civil rights worker. We got along. I remember sitting on the roof of my apartment with him that night, drinking Jack Daniels, and talking about how we each kept looking for some idea of freedom, but never really found it. I said I joined every movement I ever joined looking for freedom, and left when it became about someone else being in charge. He helped me understand a little bit about why the poor white farmers living in Northern Wisconsin tended to racism. The Posse Comitatus originated not too far to the west of Green Bay. We used to smile at each other with some kind of undefined understanding whenever "Little Pink Houses" came on the jukebox.
Monday, June 02, 2003
( 4:22 PM ) Barbara
I have no idea who wrote the following. 'Twasn't me. Could be a fella name of Ed Meece, whose name sounds vaguely familar and which actually appears at the bottom of the second little tiny sheet of note paper on which was written the following:
"...that you thought was a g. of Columbian Jungle Snow but was actually shaved bits off your connection's corvette. The Doctor approaches and begins to extract the "cola". He's seen the symptoms before and asks, "How did this happen?" At this point you remove your container of bullshit ("aw shit, he's on to me! think quick) and apply generously where needed. "...and then Doc, and this is the funny part, the three Arabs see my nose sticking out of the rough on the 17th hole and putted their new experimental fiber glass ball into it. How was I to know it was an assassination attempt? But when it exploded I inhaled as hard as I could."
This is sometime between 1979 and 1985, remember. Peculiarly timely.
#
( 1:11 PM ) Barbara
Back to the future...
July 18, 1985
Letter from Linda, doing time in the Women's Prison in Waupun, WI for helping her no-good boyfriend in a heroin deal. I still have the police report on their bust. Mighty glad I was saving heroin for my old age. Which is approaching. Still, think I'll wait another year or 5 or 10. I mean, I just quit smoking cigarettes a year ago, a little too soon to start on heroin, doncha think?
Anyway, the police report was informative at the time for its assessment of other drugs her no good boyfriend had in his possession, including some speed, which turned out to be bunk, and my (now) ex-boyfriend, who had actually bought some, was vindicated in his own private assessment.
Linda was just there when the undercover guy insisted on heroin, even though both she and the no-good boyfriend told him there wasn't anything worth getting in town, and when the ngb went to pick it up, she was driving, so here she is doing three years in prison. Taking a cosmetology exam. Taking a semester of college courses. Getting ready for a "family reintegration furlough" which is "8 days away."
I went to see her twice, I believe. She tells me, "Take care and stay in one piece. Gotta have you in one piece when I get out!" I had told her about my ngb banging my head on the ground. I left for the left coast in the fall, and don't think I saw her again. We lost touch. I hope she made it. #
Saturday, May 03, 2003
( 10:49 AM ) Barbara
Good god on a bicycle. Two receipts from the Brown County Sheriff's Office. I actually paid a total of $388.50 bond for this guy I was going with - one of the good bad guys, to be sure, but still and all....not exactly the love of my life or anything like that. This is the guy of the Jack Daniels incident, mentioned below, which has cost me more money in the ensuing years by way of chiropractor therapy for the neck he used to bang my head into the ground when I said I was leaving town. Twenty years later, I make a similar mistake. One should never assume that a college education actually makes anybody any smarter! #
Thursday, May 01, 2003
( 2:10 PM ) Barbara
So - a farewell card from Doug - "It's rare to find an open mind. I love you for the freedom you've inspired in me." Amazing note to get from a biker. I inspired freedom in HIM? Hmmmm. Doug stories - almost too numerous to tell. I'll tell one. He was doing some time in the county jail for some traffic snafu or something equally meaningless. The jail was having some construction work done on the top floor (of what was a three-five story building, I don't remember which). Doug figured out a way to get out through a ventilator vent in the ceiling into the construction area, down the side of the building, and completely away. He did this every night for the two weeks he was in there. Went to see his girlfriend and...... Well, we'll bring the curtain down tastefully on that scene. Told me he wasn't worried about getting caught sneaking out. He was worried about getting caught sneaking back in! Which he did. Every night. #
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
( 12:31 PM ) Barbara
I am writing this as a journal of disparate memories prompted by random items pulled from the folders of my life. The item for today is a matchbook from O'Shea's in Sheboygan, WI. It's a biker bar. One side reads Ride to Live, Live to Ride, printed around a winged skull. I don't know why I have it. I don't remember partying in Sheboygan. #
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
( 1:43 PM ) Barbara
This must be 1985. I'm leaving, and I get a note from a woman who says she enjoyed knowing me because I "allowed me to be me". These were biker women. A very strong bunch. Kinda like Cher's friends in MASK. The good bad guys. I wonder what happened to many of these people. I'm afraid the drugs were getting to them. I'm afraid some of them were lost. I've never returned to find out. I remember when crystal meth hit town, going over to some women friend's house one afternoon, and there they all were, high as kites, and macrame-ing everything in sight. They'd bought out the craft store. They had piles of magazines and patterns, and the living room was piled high with macrame twine. The women were shaky, nervous, couldn't stop talking, couldn't stop moving. I thought, I don't think I want to do this. I'm not too crazy about macrame'. Haven't liked it much ever since, actually. I did do some of that crystal - one last time, when I hadn't planned on it. Thought it was cocaine, actually. Until it burned. Up all night. Next day, tried to call my son in Madison. Couldn't find him. Ended up talking to a roommate of his for about an hour, babbling on and on. Embarassing to remember. Poor kid. Haven't touched it since. Gods! The 80's! #
Monday, April 28, 2003
( 4:29 PM ) Barbara
1983, and a card from another long lost friend. Nancy Crandall. She had just returned from South America, and was living in Boston "but without a stable address" as so many of us were in those days. We graduated college together. I know I saw her a year or so later, because she called the day after my first beating from a now long-gone ex-boyfriend. She helped me pull myself together, and told me that her ex used to beat her as well. We had all been in school together. So many things were not out in the open in those days. We didn't talk about it. I was embarassed. How did I have the bad taste to pick someone who would beat on me?
Those were my biker days. I had broken up with the "good" biker, and was now running with the "bad"guys. Well, not exactly. As I told my mother, we're the good bad guys, not the bad bad guys. Still and all.....It was the kind of culture that passed out little "Season's Greetings"cards that read, "Money's short, times are hard, here's your fucking Christmas card." On a sheet of paper that has some of the lyrics to Karma Chameleon (written out by someone other than myself), is a draft of a birthday card to one of the biker crowd. I said, "Dear Dusty, I don't know what to get you for your birthday. I wish I could give you freedom and happiness and the love and understanding of the lady of your choice. But I don't know that much magic. All I can give you is the wish."
Dusty and Tommy lived in a trailer behind my house, and were hiding out from the cops who were after them for driving warrants. Nothing any more serious than that.
I got beaten up because I was leaving, and my boyfriend knew I was never coming back. He didn't exactly beat me. He just banged my head against the ground over and over until I thought it was going to come off. Today I go to a chiropractor to deal with the damage he did which was not apparent until a few years ago. It was a Jack Daniels incident. I wish I knew wht happened to Nancy. #
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
( 1:14 PM ) Barbara
More about Mary. Back in Northhampton, MA in 1979, she took a job with the state mental hospital, placing people back in family homes in the community. The hospital was slated to close in 1981, so it's long gone by now. Apparently, so is CIRCA, since I find no website for them. She also mentions a feminist bookshop in Northhampton called Womonfyre, and offers to send me a record, remember those? - of Sweet Honey in the Rock. #
[4/22/2003 11:22:35 AM | Barbara Stoner]
A postcard from Mary in Las Vegas. She was on her way to California. I am in Tacoma, WA, living in my sleeping bag on the floor of a house on Salmon Beach. Salmon Beach is an old fishing village at the bottom of a bluff on Puget Sound. Technically, it is part of Tacoma, but in every other important way, it is a place unto itself. The houses are built on pilings out over the water. It was dilapidated and very nearly vacant when the hippies started moving in sometime in the 60's. When last I visited there, just a couple of years ago, the homes were going for half a million bucks. Many of the hippies got jobs and decorated. It still smelled like rotting wood and seaweed out along the boardwalk that runs behind the houses along the base of the bluff, but through the windows, you could see shiny wood and stained glass. You could see people's dreams come true.
I was in my sleeping bag on the first floor of my friend Michael's house the night Mt. St. Helen's blew up. The sound of pounding from beneath the house woke me. I thought it was a storm, and went to look out the window, expecting to see heavy surf. The surface of the Sound was smooth as glass, to coin a phrase. The sky was blue. It was a lovely day. Back in my sleeping bag, the pounding continued for awhile, like an immense heartbeat in my ear. Trolls beneath the world. We rode the motorcycle up to Seattle that day, stopping finally at the Phinney Ridge Cafe for cinnamon rolls. The customers were all gathered around a TV watching scenes from the mountain. The winds blew east that day. I watched for ash for days, but it never fell here. When I drove across eastern Washington later that summer, I had to keep the windows closed because the ash still lay in drifts along the road, and hung in the air when the wind blew.
Salmon Beach was almost paradise. Except that sometimes trees would shake loose from the bluff above and slide down and through someone's home. And if you didn't have a boat, the only way out was to climb the over 200 steps of dilapidated wooden steps that wound up to the parking lot at the top. It was the sort of climb that, if you got to the top and found you had forgotten your car keys, you knew god did not intend for you to go to work that day.
[edit]
[4/21/2003 11:30:59 AM | Barbara Stoner]
Letter postmarked 11 Aug 1979, Oakland, CA on Amtrak stationary - someone named Danny Biggs -
"As adventuresome travellers are wont to do, we met at a pub/disco in London last February for a fleeting moment (Trafalgar's club on King's Road, I think). I'll be in Wisconsin during the last 2 weeks of September. Shall I look you up?"
I wish I had answered. I don't remember him. I remember meeting a couple of English guys in a pub who claimed to be in rock 'n' roll. One of them said he would meet me at the airport when I left - that he had a surprise for me. I looked for him at the airport, but never saw him. However, someone else said that Elvis Costello was there, they'd seen him walking through the airport. I wouldn't have known Elvis Costello if he stepped on me, and my pub friend certainly wasn't him, but later I thought perhaps he was in the entourage - a roadie or something. Maybe a side man. Whatever. He wasn't Danny Biggs, however.
I'm worried about Salaam Pax. Anybody heard from him?
[edit]
[4/18/2003 11:03:44 AM | Barbara Stoner]
Back to 1979, where I discover a letter from an old friend, Mary Aubrey, born of Scottish parents in Kenya (or spent her childhood there, I don't remember which). Her father was a member of the colonial police force, and she remembers the MauMau uprising, and hiding under the furniture in the house. I haven't seen or heard from Mary since around 1980 or so, and I miss her, so if anyone here knows anything about where she may be, please let me know. The last I heard, she was with a lesbian feminist group (I think) called CIRCA in Northhampton, Massachusetts. She had beautiful black hair, and brilliant blue eyes.
[edit]
[4/17/2003 3:18:11 PM | Barbara Stoner]
Okay, so I was having this little vision last night, when I heard that there are a preponderance of Americans who think the Iraqis are ungrateful to us for coming in to bring them freedom, and I was thinking, well, if I were a woman with three kids and an abusive husband, but I was dealing with it the best I knew how, and I was thinking of ways to get myself and my children out of there, but it just wasn't possible yet, and someone else decided that I had had enough, and that they would come and save me (but they had really heard that someone was going to put a mini-mall where my house is, and that the property would be worth a small fortune, if only they could get their hands on it cheap) and - I know, I know - there should be a period in here somewhere - but it doesn't feel right, so I'll just start a new paragraph to break things up a bit
they come in with guns, chase my abusive husband all over the house, firing at him, and killing one of my children and maiming the other in the process, and somehow my husband escapes through the basement and someone puts a hole in a propane tank we have stored down there and then sits down to light a cigarette and wonder where he could have gotten to, blowing himself and my house to smithereens in the contemplative process, so that now I am alone with no visible means of support, one dead child, one maimed and one traumatized beyond all hope, no roof over my head, and all the priceless antiques inherited from my family burned to ashes...
I am now free...
Am I grateful?
Oh, cool. This rich guy from across town just showed up offering to take my property off my hands. He can't offer market price, he says, since there are too many repairs to be made, but I'll have a small profit with which to restart my life.
[edit]
[4/16/2003 12:12:12 PM | Barbara Stoner]
Pieces of life from long ago:
I have a letter here from 1979. A boyfriend and I had just finished riding from Green Bay, WI to Seattle, WA on a Harley sportster. I have just graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. I get a letter from a professor.
"Pleased to get a card. I've missed you.
"My many Washington friends and acquaintances assure me how splendid that country and Seattle are. Doubtless true. I almost went to graduate school there, coming down finally to a choice between Washington and Rutgers.
"I never plan to do anything in Pierre, South Dakota. I am in awe of your journey. Havind driven my VW Camper in the Big Horns in '75, I can appreciate the scenery more than I can understand your endurance.
"....."
ϴ's a beautiful fall day. The world seems content and interesting. And almost safe. I have pondered your suggestion that I do something slightly dangerous. I ponder a lot, of course. You have a good point. But everything seems dangerous to me. Is dangerous.
"I read a lot - very dangerous books. I recommend The Culture of Narcissism as nearly perfect. The World According to Garp, too. And Love in the Western World, by Denis de Rougemont."
And here - a journal entry from a month later:
"Instead of the money we had yesterday, we have woven place mats and white plastic cups and red plastic bowls and a blue ceramic ashtray and they are sitting on the floor in the afternoon sun on a burnt orange rug in company with a red and white box of Marlboros, a red lighter and an empty carton of Yoplait raspberry yogurt, Yogourt avec des framboises. The floor is strewn with papers and books and playing cards and an empty can of Coors. It is not raining. We are not lying in the cover of bare autumn bushes with our faces in wet leaves, cold and sick and dying. With the rent paid as it is of now we will not be there (in the cold, wet leaves) until November. I'll worry in November."
[edit]
[4/15/2003 12:37:07 PM | Barbara Stoner]
Nothing much to do the first day. I'm sitting at my computer, in the sunny part of my kitchen, looking out on a sunny yard filled with sugar magnolias and bluebells, thinking about the mayhem a world away and wondering if it will ever have anything to do with me. Knowing that it all has to do with me. I will be pulling out my notebooks and memorabilia from the last 40 or so years, and just basically remembering. I have no idea what it will turn into.
[ Mon Jun 23, 01:44:03 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Before I lose them again, here are two URL's:
http://www.mithrilstar.org/imladris/kerista.htm
http://www.toryfolliard.com/profiles.asp?artist=Munch
The first one is an article about an old San Francisco commune called Kerista and the second one MIGHT be examples of my friend Charles' art - the style looks similar.
About Kerista - Mary's last letter mentioned it, because C&J were trying to talk her into joining. I remember they came to C&J's house for a recruitment meeting. All of our little Door County counterculture group was there. I remember Brother Jud. All I could think at the time was, what a con man. He had a beard and very piercing eyes, and practiced some kind of confrontational psychology - there was a term for it and I can't remember it - it's in the Kerista article, and if I go there now, I'll lose what I've written so far here - but, as the author of the article says, another word for it is haranging (sp?). The whole thing looked like a very scary proposition to me. There was the idea of polyamory - but you had little or no choice about whom you would sleep with - it had to be a different person in your little group every night. There was little or no individuality. It was an experiment in group mind. The group would make most if not all of one's decisions for them. Several folks were interested. My ex-husband and I were definitely not. I don't know if anything got off the ground in Door County. We sold the farm and left them and each other not too much later. I remember beginning to question some of their ideas, and was immediately told that I was being negative and was not a good influence in the group. I thought that was good. I left.
[ Thu Jun 19, 02:11:01 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
October 15, 1978...Another letter. She chides me. I have not been in touch. Did not tell her I was moving into the blue gingerbread Victorian. My phone disconnected. She is alarmed. But she calls the painter and his wife, and they give her the lowdown. So she writes.
My husband and I are semi-officially separated. This begins the period where I sleep in one bedroom, he sleeps in another, I have an affair with the guy in the back apartment, he has an affair with my (new) best friend from school, who is about 15 years younger than either of us. We all hang out together. The kids are with both of us. Strange days, indeed. No wonder I have no time to write.
[ Wed Jun 18, 02:52:24 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
8.28.78 - Still on my farm in Door County. Postcard from Mary in England. Shepherds and Sheep, Detain from Window XVII, King's college Cambridge. "Quite lovely and we even punted which was hysterical! Return today amid all the tight security at London." Don't remember - IRA stuff? Actually, not still on the farm. Postcard forwarded from farm to 426 S. Webster. A beautiful blue gingerbread Victorian house. My soon to be ex-husband and I moved in there with every intention of buying it and sharing it. There was a separate apartment in the back. The children could go back and forth. No money to do the place justice, however. And the farm did not sell in time to buy the house. It burned down a few years after we left there, and we were only there for a year or so, if that. There are stories, however.....
[ Tue Jun 17, 06:23:00 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
November 3, 1979 - I am in Seattle. With a new boyfriend. After riding from Green Bay, WI to Seattle on the back on his '69 Harley Sportster. I sent her a picture. "My dear, you look such a dyke" :) I think this is the letter that firmly decided me not to "experiment" with lesbianism. I had no real interest in it. My only interest was the possibility that I got along with my women friends so well, and my relationships with men seemed to go so wrong so quickly. But listening to Mary's adventures, I discovered that emotional relationships are emotional relationships, no matter who or where or what. I wouldn't be gaining anything. After a beautiful recital of the beginning of a love affair, and the disastrous end of same, she writes:
"Well, Barbara of the Big City, is that how it goes then? Or is it only in those old English/middle French medieval texts that such things happen and bound as we are by the realities of the time we live in, there is no place for such illusions. Seems like a lot of what therapy is about is giving up the illusions that we all carry about what we can/can't get from people - those primal desires which were never satisfied for us. However, I don't want to give All of them up. There has to be another level to reality other than reality itself. Maybe I'm just too much of a romantic to see/deal with things as shitty as they usually are. Well, we are both out of our time - you, my dear, are an Elizabethan through and through, definitely of Shakespeare's time methinks - me, well, I always see myself as around the time of Byron/Shelley surrounded by all those dying love poems...male though, not female, otherwise I'll end up sitting around being read too rather than doing the reading..."
Is it any wonder I miss her?
[ Tue Jun 17, 03:37:13 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Looks like I'm going on a Mary kick for a few days. The next pile of things seems to be a pile of letters. Actually, I just found a woman with her name in Amherst, MA, and sent her a card by snail mail, with my phone number & stuff. Could be.....
Let's see - this one is dated September 3rd, and there are references to my being in school, so this must be 1978, since I graduated in 1979. I am apparently still on the farm, but I am thinking about leaving. My memory of that fall is a little hazy. I was probably disoriented, broke and confused. See below...
She has been gone for a year, going to school at Goddard in MA, separating from her husband, and just beginning to deal with being a lesbian. She is just back from visiting her parents and sister in England, very disoriented, broke, and confused about her future. Sounds like she's right on track for 1978!
I hope the woman in Amherst is her. I hope she answers me.
Wonder where tomorrow's letter will take me?
[ Mon Jun 16, 05:42:45 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Just realized I wrote about the Sheriff's receipts already. Just picked up the same bits again, and at least got a little more story squeezed out of 'em. Rearranged my stack of stuff so that they are in two different places - onward into the flotsam...
2.21.81 - Amherst, MA - letter from Mary, addressed to me in Pittsburgh, where I am attending graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh on a teaching assistantship. I am, if memory serves me right, about a month away from my "on the bus" Dead show. Graduate school will go the way of the dinosaurs. Or was that me, going the way of the dinosaurs? Mary is thinking about going into business for herself (she's a therapist), leaving the feminist collective (CIRCA) she has been involved with. Reagan is in the White House. She's thinking of becoming a citizen (she's a Scot - technically, a Brit). "I have a fear I'll be deported some day."
[ Mon Jun 16, 02:58:44 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
06.06.84 - a little more than 19 years ago - two receipts from the Brown County Sheriff's Office for a total of 388.50 in payment of bond for the NGB. My only excuse is that he hadn't hit me yet. I think I was trying to prove what a great old lady I was. I mean, I had a degree in intellectual history - magna cum laude, in fact - but I guess I needed some kind of reassurance that I was a success as a human being as well, and that perhaps I deserved being treated well. I wanted him to consider himself very lucky that he had me. I think he did. So much so that he didn't want me to leave the following year, and tried to beat my head into the ground. I seem to remember another time when I tried to throw a knife out the window. It hung up in the windowsill on the screen, but that action in itself broke up his impulse that had considered using it, so it wasn't an entirely useless action. I'm not trying to make any excuses for him (we were pretty drunk both of these times, and these incidents were not the usual thing in my relationships), but I did know and perhaps he suspected that I had picked him out of the crowd because he had a nice bike and he was single. And he was a nice guy most of the time. Nobody deserves getting their heads banged into the ground or threatened with a knife. It's also true that no one deserves to be bamboozled into falling in love with someone who is only trying to prove herself as a worthy human being, and who likes your bike.
[ Mon Jun 09, 02:13:13 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Moving ahead a couple of years, it is 1980, and I believe I am in Seattle for the first time, receiving a card from my friend Vicki - a beautiful card, dated 2.26.80 - with a wonderful picture of a woman in a clown suite, wearing a green hat, and a face composed of the night sky, also reflected around her, but with a rainbow in the center. She holds a mask of a beautiful woman's face. The card reads, "If you're afraid of the dark...remember the night rainbow."
Vicki was the most stylish woman I knew in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She was a very singular woman, and I felt lucky to count her as a close acquaintance, not to mention the possiblity of actual friendship. I admired her very much. She looked like she should be CEO of some very successful company, dressing in vintage clothing that she always made look like the very latest thing, and very uniquely her own at the same time. She talks in the card about dancing, both teaching and doing. Dance was what she wanted to do most in the world.
I saw her again a year or so later when I was back in Green Bay to pick up a car, I think. That's another story. I went to a wedding reception for somebody I don't remember and she was there. She had joined the army. I didn't get a chance to talk with her for long. I haven't heard from her since. I hope she found someplace to dance.
[ Fri Jun 06, 02:58:23 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Wheeee------into the wayback machine-----------the year is 1978. I'm still married. To my second husband. But not for long. My daughter is 2. My son is 11. I am the central figure in a very large painting by Charles Munch entitled "6 Women". I am laying in the basic Venus position on a bench, although I do not resemble Venus in the least. Far too skinny. My friend the aforementioned Mary is the figure to the far right. My dear friend Marion, who I must believe to be dead by now, or in her 80's or 90's somewhere, is lying on the floor. I can't remember the name of the woman to the left, but I do remember her. I can see her smiling. My friend, who I worked with at the nursery, is there. Sue painted incredibly beautiful flowers. Ice cream colored flowers, I think I called them in a poem I wrote for her.
I remember posing for this picture. Oh, did I mention - we're all nude. My friend Charles, the painter (he won the top money prize at Wisconsin '78 for this painting, for which I have the brochure with a b&w photo of the painting on the opening page), is/was tall, rather ascetic looking, blonde. He made me lie on this hard bench. No, I couldn't have anything soft underneath me because it would throw the balance of the pose off just ever so much. My elbow is resting on the hard bench. It hurt. I think that's Charles' wife bending over in front of me, grabbing her ankle.
I'm still rather at a loss of the point of the painting. A statement by the Juror, one Ellen Lanyon, painter, of Chicago and New York, says: "Realism, surrealism, mysticism, fantasism, cubism, color conceptualism, constructivism, non-objectivism, opism, popism, optimism and narration..." What! Not Narrism? Can't remember another such string of isms in one place. She is "impressed with the impact of the environment, myth and the desire to communicate a sense of place or state of condition in most of the works." I still don't get it. I think I'm dense. I just liked helping out a friend and being in a big painting with a lot of other friends. I never see these people anymore. I am happy to know we are all still together somewhere.
[ Thu Jun 05, 11:37:50 AM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Now here's a soap opera in a paper bag. ON a paper bag, actually. A little note. Don't know why I have it. Don't know why I kept it. It reads:
"Tommy, I didn't want to wake you up again! I decided to walk. Give me a call later. See ya. Joy."
Tommy was one of the bikers living in the trailer in my back yard for awhile. Joy was just a friend, I think. The note smacks of promises (a ride home?), a late night party?, a liason? What, what? There are all the ingredients here for a short story. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it. I'm already writing another story. I should send it to my writer's group. Actually, here I go to do just that.......
[ Wed Jun 04, 02:13:52 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Linda was the first person I visited in prison. Not that I made a career out of it. I think I visited an NGB (no-good-boyfriend), and then my friend Kevin, but that story comes much later on. I didn't even know her very well. She was the girlfriend of a guy who was a brother to a very good friend of ours (my boyfriend and me). We never liked him. He was into hard drugs - heroin, dilaudid. He had a scam running with the local dentists where he'd visit the dentist with his honestly terrible horrible very bad teeth, get a scrip for a pain killer (dilaudid), make an appointment to get the teeth fixed, and never show up. He'd go from dentist to dentist this way, until he was blacklisted with nearly every dentist in northeastern Wisconsin. Linda was a sweet pretty waitress who did the drugs too, but was basically a very nice person. It's possible that prison was the best thing that ever happened to her, although I really hate saying things like that when I've only been a visitor. What the hell do I know about what it was like or what she could have done for herself without it. Anyway, her NGB would go so far as to show my boyfriend naked pictures of her and try to arrange for a swap, which basically would have caused me to stick my finger down my throat and say "gag me with a spoon" if that phrase were available then. Don't remember when it first came on the scene. My not nearly as bad NGB wouldn't go for it.
I don't know how many more of these letters there are. This last letter says she'll be out in November, and she "intends on dragging you out to party!" I left for Seattle in September.
[ Tue Jun 03, 04:07:04 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
LPH by John Cougar Mellencamp. I just looked it up to be sure, and found the lyrics, which I might as well post since I got 'em:
Pink Houses
There's a black man with a black cat livin' in a black neighborhood
He's got an interstate runnin' through his front yard
You know he thinks that he's got it so good
And there's a woman in the kitchen cleanin' up the evenin' slop
And he looks at her and says, "Hey darlin', I can remember when
you could stop a clock."
CHORUS:
Oh but ain't that America for you and me
Ain't that America somethin' to see baby
Ain't that America home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me
There's a young man in a t-shirt
Listenin' to a rockin' rollin' station
He's got greasy hair, greasy smile
He says, "Lord this must be my destination."
'Cause they told me when I was younger
"Boy you're gonna be president."
But just like everything else those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went
CHORUS
Well there's people and more people
What do they know know know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico
Ooh yeah
And ther's winners and there's losers
But they ain't no big deal
'Cause the simple man baby pays for the thrills, the bills,
the pills that kill
CHORUS
[ Tue Jun 03, 04:01:43 PM | Barbara Stoner | edit ]
Just another letter from Linda in prison written on stationary designed by the no good boyfriend (doing his own sweet time elsewhere) that has the Harley eagle wtih a skull and Viking helmet in the center. I think I liked it at the time. Smacks a little bit of Aryan Nation now. Don't know if he was into that. Green Bay bike club made strange (I want to say bedfellows here, but that could give a wilder impression than was actually the fact - only one of the "club" guys was actually a bedfellow). I did get drunk with the President of the club (leaving it nameless for the time being) one night, and he did in fact sleep with me, but that was only sleep. More specifically, passed out. First time I found out I snored.
The Pres was an ex-Nazi. I was an ex-civil rights worker. We got along. I remember sitting on the roof of my apartment with him that night, drinking Jack Daniels, and talking about how we each kept looking for some idea of freedom, but never really found it. I said I joined every movement I ever joined looking for freedom, and left when it became about someone else being in charge. He helped me understand a little bit about why the poor white farmers living in Northern Wisconsin tended to racism. The Posse Comitatus originated not too far to the west of Green Bay. We used to smile at each other with some kind of undefined understanding whenever "Little Pink Houses" came on the jukebox.
Monday, June 02, 2003
( 4:22 PM ) Barbara
I have no idea who wrote the following. 'Twasn't me. Could be a fella name of Ed Meece, whose name sounds vaguely familar and which actually appears at the bottom of the second little tiny sheet of note paper on which was written the following:
"...that you thought was a g. of Columbian Jungle Snow but was actually shaved bits off your connection's corvette. The Doctor approaches and begins to extract the "cola". He's seen the symptoms before and asks, "How did this happen?" At this point you remove your container of bullshit ("aw shit, he's on to me! think quick) and apply generously where needed. "...and then Doc, and this is the funny part, the three Arabs see my nose sticking out of the rough on the 17th hole and putted their new experimental fiber glass ball into it. How was I to know it was an assassination attempt? But when it exploded I inhaled as hard as I could."
This is sometime between 1979 and 1985, remember. Peculiarly timely.
#
( 1:11 PM ) Barbara
Back to the future...
July 18, 1985
Letter from Linda, doing time in the Women's Prison in Waupun, WI for helping her no-good boyfriend in a heroin deal. I still have the police report on their bust. Mighty glad I was saving heroin for my old age. Which is approaching. Still, think I'll wait another year or 5 or 10. I mean, I just quit smoking cigarettes a year ago, a little too soon to start on heroin, doncha think?
Anyway, the police report was informative at the time for its assessment of other drugs her no good boyfriend had in his possession, including some speed, which turned out to be bunk, and my (now) ex-boyfriend, who had actually bought some, was vindicated in his own private assessment.
Linda was just there when the undercover guy insisted on heroin, even though both she and the no-good boyfriend told him there wasn't anything worth getting in town, and when the ngb went to pick it up, she was driving, so here she is doing three years in prison. Taking a cosmetology exam. Taking a semester of college courses. Getting ready for a "family reintegration furlough" which is "8 days away."
I went to see her twice, I believe. She tells me, "Take care and stay in one piece. Gotta have you in one piece when I get out!" I had told her about my ngb banging my head on the ground. I left for the left coast in the fall, and don't think I saw her again. We lost touch. I hope she made it. #
Saturday, May 03, 2003
( 10:49 AM ) Barbara
Good god on a bicycle. Two receipts from the Brown County Sheriff's Office. I actually paid a total of $388.50 bond for this guy I was going with - one of the good bad guys, to be sure, but still and all....not exactly the love of my life or anything like that. This is the guy of the Jack Daniels incident, mentioned below, which has cost me more money in the ensuing years by way of chiropractor therapy for the neck he used to bang my head into the ground when I said I was leaving town. Twenty years later, I make a similar mistake. One should never assume that a college education actually makes anybody any smarter! #
Thursday, May 01, 2003
( 2:10 PM ) Barbara
So - a farewell card from Doug - "It's rare to find an open mind. I love you for the freedom you've inspired in me." Amazing note to get from a biker. I inspired freedom in HIM? Hmmmm. Doug stories - almost too numerous to tell. I'll tell one. He was doing some time in the county jail for some traffic snafu or something equally meaningless. The jail was having some construction work done on the top floor (of what was a three-five story building, I don't remember which). Doug figured out a way to get out through a ventilator vent in the ceiling into the construction area, down the side of the building, and completely away. He did this every night for the two weeks he was in there. Went to see his girlfriend and...... Well, we'll bring the curtain down tastefully on that scene. Told me he wasn't worried about getting caught sneaking out. He was worried about getting caught sneaking back in! Which he did. Every night. #
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
( 12:31 PM ) Barbara
I am writing this as a journal of disparate memories prompted by random items pulled from the folders of my life. The item for today is a matchbook from O'Shea's in Sheboygan, WI. It's a biker bar. One side reads Ride to Live, Live to Ride, printed around a winged skull. I don't know why I have it. I don't remember partying in Sheboygan. #
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
( 1:43 PM ) Barbara
This must be 1985. I'm leaving, and I get a note from a woman who says she enjoyed knowing me because I "allowed me to be me". These were biker women. A very strong bunch. Kinda like Cher's friends in MASK. The good bad guys. I wonder what happened to many of these people. I'm afraid the drugs were getting to them. I'm afraid some of them were lost. I've never returned to find out. I remember when crystal meth hit town, going over to some women friend's house one afternoon, and there they all were, high as kites, and macrame-ing everything in sight. They'd bought out the craft store. They had piles of magazines and patterns, and the living room was piled high with macrame twine. The women were shaky, nervous, couldn't stop talking, couldn't stop moving. I thought, I don't think I want to do this. I'm not too crazy about macrame'. Haven't liked it much ever since, actually. I did do some of that crystal - one last time, when I hadn't planned on it. Thought it was cocaine, actually. Until it burned. Up all night. Next day, tried to call my son in Madison. Couldn't find him. Ended up talking to a roommate of his for about an hour, babbling on and on. Embarassing to remember. Poor kid. Haven't touched it since. Gods! The 80's! #
Monday, April 28, 2003
( 4:29 PM ) Barbara
1983, and a card from another long lost friend. Nancy Crandall. She had just returned from South America, and was living in Boston "but without a stable address" as so many of us were in those days. We graduated college together. I know I saw her a year or so later, because she called the day after my first beating from a now long-gone ex-boyfriend. She helped me pull myself together, and told me that her ex used to beat her as well. We had all been in school together. So many things were not out in the open in those days. We didn't talk about it. I was embarassed. How did I have the bad taste to pick someone who would beat on me?
Those were my biker days. I had broken up with the "good" biker, and was now running with the "bad"guys. Well, not exactly. As I told my mother, we're the good bad guys, not the bad bad guys. Still and all.....It was the kind of culture that passed out little "Season's Greetings"cards that read, "Money's short, times are hard, here's your fucking Christmas card." On a sheet of paper that has some of the lyrics to Karma Chameleon (written out by someone other than myself), is a draft of a birthday card to one of the biker crowd. I said, "Dear Dusty, I don't know what to get you for your birthday. I wish I could give you freedom and happiness and the love and understanding of the lady of your choice. But I don't know that much magic. All I can give you is the wish."
Dusty and Tommy lived in a trailer behind my house, and were hiding out from the cops who were after them for driving warrants. Nothing any more serious than that.
I got beaten up because I was leaving, and my boyfriend knew I was never coming back. He didn't exactly beat me. He just banged my head against the ground over and over until I thought it was going to come off. Today I go to a chiropractor to deal with the damage he did which was not apparent until a few years ago. It was a Jack Daniels incident. I wish I knew wht happened to Nancy. #
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
( 1:14 PM ) Barbara
More about Mary. Back in Northhampton, MA in 1979, she took a job with the state mental hospital, placing people back in family homes in the community. The hospital was slated to close in 1981, so it's long gone by now. Apparently, so is CIRCA, since I find no website for them. She also mentions a feminist bookshop in Northhampton called Womonfyre, and offers to send me a record, remember those? - of Sweet Honey in the Rock. #
[4/22/2003 11:22:35 AM | Barbara Stoner]
A postcard from Mary in Las Vegas. She was on her way to California. I am in Tacoma, WA, living in my sleeping bag on the floor of a house on Salmon Beach. Salmon Beach is an old fishing village at the bottom of a bluff on Puget Sound. Technically, it is part of Tacoma, but in every other important way, it is a place unto itself. The houses are built on pilings out over the water. It was dilapidated and very nearly vacant when the hippies started moving in sometime in the 60's. When last I visited there, just a couple of years ago, the homes were going for half a million bucks. Many of the hippies got jobs and decorated. It still smelled like rotting wood and seaweed out along the boardwalk that runs behind the houses along the base of the bluff, but through the windows, you could see shiny wood and stained glass. You could see people's dreams come true.
I was in my sleeping bag on the first floor of my friend Michael's house the night Mt. St. Helen's blew up. The sound of pounding from beneath the house woke me. I thought it was a storm, and went to look out the window, expecting to see heavy surf. The surface of the Sound was smooth as glass, to coin a phrase. The sky was blue. It was a lovely day. Back in my sleeping bag, the pounding continued for awhile, like an immense heartbeat in my ear. Trolls beneath the world. We rode the motorcycle up to Seattle that day, stopping finally at the Phinney Ridge Cafe for cinnamon rolls. The customers were all gathered around a TV watching scenes from the mountain. The winds blew east that day. I watched for ash for days, but it never fell here. When I drove across eastern Washington later that summer, I had to keep the windows closed because the ash still lay in drifts along the road, and hung in the air when the wind blew.
Salmon Beach was almost paradise. Except that sometimes trees would shake loose from the bluff above and slide down and through someone's home. And if you didn't have a boat, the only way out was to climb the over 200 steps of dilapidated wooden steps that wound up to the parking lot at the top. It was the sort of climb that, if you got to the top and found you had forgotten your car keys, you knew god did not intend for you to go to work that day.
[edit]
[4/21/2003 11:30:59 AM | Barbara Stoner]
Letter postmarked 11 Aug 1979, Oakland, CA on Amtrak stationary - someone named Danny Biggs -
"As adventuresome travellers are wont to do, we met at a pub/disco in London last February for a fleeting moment (Trafalgar's club on King's Road, I think). I'll be in Wisconsin during the last 2 weeks of September. Shall I look you up?"
I wish I had answered. I don't remember him. I remember meeting a couple of English guys in a pub who claimed to be in rock 'n' roll. One of them said he would meet me at the airport when I left - that he had a surprise for me. I looked for him at the airport, but never saw him. However, someone else said that Elvis Costello was there, they'd seen him walking through the airport. I wouldn't have known Elvis Costello if he stepped on me, and my pub friend certainly wasn't him, but later I thought perhaps he was in the entourage - a roadie or something. Maybe a side man. Whatever. He wasn't Danny Biggs, however.
I'm worried about Salaam Pax. Anybody heard from him?
[edit]
[4/18/2003 11:03:44 AM | Barbara Stoner]
Back to 1979, where I discover a letter from an old friend, Mary Aubrey, born of Scottish parents in Kenya (or spent her childhood there, I don't remember which). Her father was a member of the colonial police force, and she remembers the MauMau uprising, and hiding under the furniture in the house. I haven't seen or heard from Mary since around 1980 or so, and I miss her, so if anyone here knows anything about where she may be, please let me know. The last I heard, she was with a lesbian feminist group (I think) called CIRCA in Northhampton, Massachusetts. She had beautiful black hair, and brilliant blue eyes.
[edit]
[4/17/2003 3:18:11 PM | Barbara Stoner]
Okay, so I was having this little vision last night, when I heard that there are a preponderance of Americans who think the Iraqis are ungrateful to us for coming in to bring them freedom, and I was thinking, well, if I were a woman with three kids and an abusive husband, but I was dealing with it the best I knew how, and I was thinking of ways to get myself and my children out of there, but it just wasn't possible yet, and someone else decided that I had had enough, and that they would come and save me (but they had really heard that someone was going to put a mini-mall where my house is, and that the property would be worth a small fortune, if only they could get their hands on it cheap) and - I know, I know - there should be a period in here somewhere - but it doesn't feel right, so I'll just start a new paragraph to break things up a bit
they come in with guns, chase my abusive husband all over the house, firing at him, and killing one of my children and maiming the other in the process, and somehow my husband escapes through the basement and someone puts a hole in a propane tank we have stored down there and then sits down to light a cigarette and wonder where he could have gotten to, blowing himself and my house to smithereens in the contemplative process, so that now I am alone with no visible means of support, one dead child, one maimed and one traumatized beyond all hope, no roof over my head, and all the priceless antiques inherited from my family burned to ashes...
I am now free...
Am I grateful?
Oh, cool. This rich guy from across town just showed up offering to take my property off my hands. He can't offer market price, he says, since there are too many repairs to be made, but I'll have a small profit with which to restart my life.
[edit]
[4/16/2003 12:12:12 PM | Barbara Stoner]
Pieces of life from long ago:
I have a letter here from 1979. A boyfriend and I had just finished riding from Green Bay, WI to Seattle, WA on a Harley sportster. I have just graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. I get a letter from a professor.
"Pleased to get a card. I've missed you.
"My many Washington friends and acquaintances assure me how splendid that country and Seattle are. Doubtless true. I almost went to graduate school there, coming down finally to a choice between Washington and Rutgers.
"I never plan to do anything in Pierre, South Dakota. I am in awe of your journey. Havind driven my VW Camper in the Big Horns in '75, I can appreciate the scenery more than I can understand your endurance.
"....."
ϴ's a beautiful fall day. The world seems content and interesting. And almost safe. I have pondered your suggestion that I do something slightly dangerous. I ponder a lot, of course. You have a good point. But everything seems dangerous to me. Is dangerous.
"I read a lot - very dangerous books. I recommend The Culture of Narcissism as nearly perfect. The World According to Garp, too. And Love in the Western World, by Denis de Rougemont."
And here - a journal entry from a month later:
"Instead of the money we had yesterday, we have woven place mats and white plastic cups and red plastic bowls and a blue ceramic ashtray and they are sitting on the floor in the afternoon sun on a burnt orange rug in company with a red and white box of Marlboros, a red lighter and an empty carton of Yoplait raspberry yogurt, Yogourt avec des framboises. The floor is strewn with papers and books and playing cards and an empty can of Coors. It is not raining. We are not lying in the cover of bare autumn bushes with our faces in wet leaves, cold and sick and dying. With the rent paid as it is of now we will not be there (in the cold, wet leaves) until November. I'll worry in November."
[edit]
[4/15/2003 12:37:07 PM | Barbara Stoner]
Nothing much to do the first day. I'm sitting at my computer, in the sunny part of my kitchen, looking out on a sunny yard filled with sugar magnolias and bluebells, thinking about the mayhem a world away and wondering if it will ever have anything to do with me. Knowing that it all has to do with me. I will be pulling out my notebooks and memorabilia from the last 40 or so years, and just basically remembering. I have no idea what it will turn into.
