Janine
David Nelson Hilliard
A local author wrote a book about experiencing tragedy in life, leaving her old life behind, doing a poorly planned exhausting walk, and then finding happiness and success in my home town. This story is about someone who had a somewhat similar arc in her history.
Prologue – Girls were never easy for me. Me -short, bad complexion, non-athletic, no social skills. First sort of girlfriend in grade school, first kiss was with someone who was convenient for both of us. There was no spark.
In high school I ended up with a sometimes / long distance girlfriend towards the end of school. For me, her main virtues were a large chest and physical fun. Either because of cruelty or lack of attention on my part or inevitability, she dumped me. Horrible at the time, good in retrospect.
After high school, I went to Portland State College. Note College. That was what it was when I was there. I was back about ten years ago and it looked like the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in the intervening forty years.
For awhile I commuted from parents’ home, but later moved into a series of hovels with a series of roommates. At that time PSC was largely limited to four buildings, including the former Lincoln High School. While I was there, the old buildings and apartments were being torn down for I-405, urban renewal or college expansion. You could gamble on which would get the building in which you were living. There was no official campus housing as far I know.
After being dumped by my former girlfriend, my social life was limited to school buds, some going back to high school, and girls who were friends, most of whom did not appeal to me.
My drinking and drugging started fairly late. Like many college students I largely lived on burgers, beer and pot for awhile. I fooled with some other stuff, but was never interested in injection drugs.
Enter Janine – This was around 1963 or 1964. Crazy story, I don’t remember a lot, it’s been almost fifty years during which I’ve only talked to her once for a few minutes. I can’t give any sort of coherent chronology or meaning to what happened to us, I probably couldn’t have even then. Some fragments:
I met her when she was working in a hamburger joint close to college. Beautiful and friendly, so I took a chance and asked her out. She had black shoulder length hair, pale freckled skin, delicate features and a trim figure. Her beauty was natural with any clothes and only lipstick for makeup. I later found out that I was taking classes from her father.
Here is what little that I can remember:
The hamburger stand, I think it was Amel’s or some such, was a local gathering place. I think that at one time a guy from my high school, Brian Cole, who was later in the pop group the Association was one of the gang. He died of an overdose. An old guy who was about the age that I am now held forth on how the seaweed cure had fixed all his ills. The cook called me Maynard G. Krebs in reference to the Bob Denver (pre-Gilligan’s Island) who played a beatnik in the TV program of the time “Dobie Gillis”. In turn, I called him Archie, as in the teenage comic book character. Another employee at the place was known as “Birdwoman” because of her thin figure and bulging eyes. She was reputed to be easy.
One time while asleep in the cheap dungeon basement where I was staying a guy came in and asked where his wife was, referring to Janine. Was she really married then? I don’t know.
While helping her up onto some bleachers, she commented on my strength. I felt great.
While driving somewhere she leaned over me to adjust something. I copped a feel and she gave me hell. Asked how I would like it if she grabbed my dick. I didn’t tell her I’d love it.
At one point, I was going to drive her to her parent’s house when she insisted I let her out on the streets of Portland. Later a cop visited me while I was working a summer job out of town to ask me about her rape. Jumping Jesus. I never got any details. Later she drove down to meet me at a summer job in Gold Beach. It seems that it was around July 4, 1964, my nephew’s birth date. Not much happened while she was there, but the hotel owner raised hell because there was a girl in my room.
She once asked me about my idea of a wholesome girl. I foolishly said the first thing that came to mind – blue eyed blonde. She told me off because her adopted sister was American Indian. She could go from friendly, sparkly, funny charming to cold and angry on a dime. In her happy moments, she mugged, did jokes and accents. I remember her asking me if I’d love here if she were seven feet tall. I don’t remember my answer, but I do remember being charmed.
At one point I suggested that she might have been unfaithful. She invited me to feel her vagina to show that it was cold and had not been used lately.
Somewhere going to or from her house, I believe at her suggestion, I had sex in a car for the only time in my life.
She asked me to bed one time early in our relationship and I suggested that we wait. Idiot.
She invited me to a Ukrainian folk dance and I turned her down. I was bereft of curiosity about other cultures and rather churlish.
Afternoon delight was interrupted by landlady of house in Goose Hollow which was to be torn down for I-405.
The time I got crab lice, I couldn’t think of another source. She was extremely insulted when I suggested that they came from her.
During the time that we were sort of together, she stayed at different places, most of which I did not know, despite nominally living with her parents. One time she stayed with my parents.
My parents liked her, but my mother wondered if she was on drugs. I doubt it.
I got along well with her family and the two of us plus both sets of parents had a pleasant dinner together.
While at a movie, a fellow that I know tried to sit next to us. We moved away. The only real significance is that the fellow’s name said in the right sequence is obscene.
Why these reminisces? Emotional moments stick in our memories. I always wonder when someone is asked what he was doing at 3:00 on June 22, he is expected to have any idea what was happening then. We forget almost everything. As an example of something memorable, I was visiting another woman at her parent’s home while their dog persistently presented an erection to all assembled. We all studiously ignored it.
After I graduated from Portland State and went to U of Oregon, I returned to Portland and gave her a call. She totally dumped me with no reason given. I had hoped during the rare times that our relationship was working that we could eventually be married.
As I said, I have no coherent story of our relationship. From my side, I was so pleased to being with a beautiful exciting girl; I lived with the instability of our relationship. I felt so lucky that she would be my girlfriend – if indeed she was. I was something of a dateless wonder – not attractive, not interesting.
After Janine, my other relationships were unsatisfactory, but not as weird, until I met Sally, a beautiful blonde that likes short guys. After Janine, it was Joan, a fix-up by my sister. We got along fairly well, but we had an unspoken disagreement about the priority of sex and marriage. While at my first graduate school, I had a very short liaison with an older woman who was experimenting with heterosexuality. Soon thereafter she was a committed lesbian. The next one was the Midwest Baptist Virgin, who had a crush on me. I did not treat her very well, particularly after I met Sally.
By the time Sally and I met, we were fairly settled in life and after a very short, completely drama free time, we got married, and lived a mostly happy, occasionally grumpy life thereafter.
Exit Janine – For the next twenty seven years, I neither heard from nor thought much about Janine. Life went on and we moved around the country.
Reenter Janine – We moved to the Portland area in 1997 in order to cash out our California house and help my aging mother. After we first moved here, I thought she might still be living in the area and I began to think about her occasionally. At some point, I determined that she lived in Seattle with her husband, but I did not act upon the information.
When her father died, I would have gone to the memorial, mostly to see her, but I had a conflict.
When her mother died three years ago, Sally and I did go to the memorial. After looking for an old woman resembling my memory of Janine, I found her looking very young and very good. She was somewhat gaunt with graying hair and darker skin than I remember. I introduced her to Sally, but she introduced me to no one. We had a brief, civil conversation. Neither one of us mentioned our prior rocky relationship. She asked if I was still teaching, so she must have known something about me after our last painful conversation. I told her how good she looked. Later Sally told me that she was not so impressed by her looks.
Up until a few days ago, I had mostly put thoughts of her behind me, but then I decided that I needed to record what I knew of the mystery woman in my life. I originally wrote to an address I found under her married name to ask why she dumped me. The letter with obvious changes:
Dear Janine –
I’ve become somewhat reflective about my past recently, partly because many people close to me have died. I think that you knew______. He went a couple of years ago from cancer. Another friend of mine that you may not know, _____, went the first of this month from ALS.
Given that introduction, I proceed carefully. After I went to U of O, I came back to Portland called you and you cut off all contact with me. Maybe I should know why, but I don’t. Forty-nine years later, you probably have no remembrance of the occasion. My request or imposition is for you to tell me what happened. Feel free to be blunt if you know what I’m talking about. You don’t owe me an answer and I don’t expect one, but I’d still like to know.
We are doing fine and I hope that you and your family are doing well.
Sincerely, David Nelson Hilliard
That came back “no such address”. I tried another letter under her maiden name. I got a card from her whole family to Sally and me with an answer to my question. She said that a past trauma from another part of the country caused her to leave her memories behind to restart somewhere else, but while that move did not work out exactly as planned, she did start her family in a new location. She said that I was a friend that deserved an explanation for what had happened.
This is an example of why we should be careful what we ask for. Her letter caused me a lot of grief and wonderment:
What part of the ups and downs of our relationship was caused by the earlier trauma?
I did not think that our relationship was ever “friends”, but maybe it could be now.
She let me think for almost fifty years that I had done something wrong; however I now know that she had her reasons.
What was the effect of her move on other people?
Given the time it took to get her response, was this something that was carefully considered for diplomacy and maybe even have been a committee response?
Did simply moving out of town magically heal her trauma? Was there therapy? Were there bumps in her new relationship as there were in ours?
Why was her response family to family instead of person to person?
Even though I could not have a partner better than Sally, digging back into the past has been very stressful and depressing for me. I will get past it, and I don’t see pursuing anything else about this episode from the 1960s.
Janine’s letter made me feel bad about my bitterness, so I wrote what may be my last communication with her.
August 28, 2014
Dear Janine –
Thank you for that kind and thoughtful letter. I had carried hurt and anger around for a long time, but I want to let it go. I am so sorry that I did not try to understand and help you with what you were going through, I assumed that your departure had something to do with me. I should know that it is usually NOT about me. I wasn’t much of a friend. I tell people that I have no social skills partly because it is true and partly because it lowers expectations. If we can stay away from our dark places maybe we can be friends again.
I’m also sorry about your experience with UW. Those were the days of ridiculous gender discrimination.
The address mess ups were based on bad public information. I knew that you were a ______, but the second letter I sent (not to your return address) listed you as _______. The first to ________ was returned saying no such address.
Because I am now a writer (foreshadowing), I am going to give you a chronology of why I asked you that question after 49 years. I am sorry if my question sent you to a place you wanted to forget. I hope not to do that again.
If you have the patience, here we go.
First there are the horrible things going on around the world always and the death of friends and family, and war criminal George Bush as background.
We returned to Portland in 1997 after wandering around the country for close to three decades. I tried to hook up with some old friends, mostly unsuccessfully. Of course you were a major Portland connection.
After spending thirty or forty years involved with complex computations, I switched to almost totally physical work – volunteering at a state park, hiking, snowshoeing and a little running (more foreshadowing). My unused brain is turning to mush.
Around Christmas 1999 Sally’s mother died in a car crash with Sally’s brother driving. Her going back and forth across the country to Detroit put quite a strain on me, not to mention her. I started to write fiction with lots of deaths, homicides and suicides. I had hopes of gaining from my author sister’s coattails, but her mysteries were never popular enough.
In 2011 we had a great high school reunion at McMenamin’s Edgefield. I spent much of the time with the high school golden boy – all metro football, Purple Heart, and a swell guy. After being a total loser in high school, I was finally cool. He was dead in a couple of months. I am relishing my role as a Portland Old Boy, I am not saying consarn it yet, but I worry about teenagers and have grown a disreputable beard.
At this point, we need a little levity. If you remember the dinner with _____ and his then wife Terry (they had a difficult divorce – she is / was an alcoholic –he got diabetes during the proceedings), we said that if we were only charged for half of the dinners, we could leave a big tip. We were and we could. We were celebrating an award he received for a weight that fell on him while he was on stage in high school.
I joined the foreshadowed Portland Old Boys a few years ago and give speeches from time to time. It satisfies some of my need to continue in show business from the time I wrote and developed software.
My father’s health declined rapidly when he was 70. I was 70 in 2013 and I have some of the same problems.
We are now up to 2014. I was working in the park with my asthmatic 81 year old mentor (he has over 20,000 volunteer hours and is legendary) and wondered what we would do when we were unable to continue hard labor. He did not have much of an idea, but I said I wanted to write again. Little did I know at the time?
A little while later I picked up Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ from the book store where I volunteer. I found the book very depressing for me because of her journey from trauma to success and happiness through challenging and exciting experiences. Compared to her, I’ve done nothing, and nothing has happened to me. Digression – there are ways that ‘Wild’ parallels your story, at least in a good way I hope. The book is the proximate cause of my deep funk, but there are the other factors. So my challenge was to accomplish somehow, the three things that she did. Do a grand physical event, write, and face the past and see what of significance has happened, good and bad.
The physical part up in the air because of joint problems. I have written a lot and have two short stories appearing soon in small literary journals with subscriber lists that would probably fit in your living room. I hope to find a local mentor to help me either do a novel or a book of short stories. The question to you was part of the facing the past. I have written several partial memoirs on different aspects of my life. A couple feature ‘Janine’ and many memoirs and fiction have ‘Duke’ and ‘Sally’. Note the initials. Those that are intensely personal are written by “David Nelson Hilliard” and all names are changed.
You now have the story of whining and introspection by someone with a wonderful life, set off by a book.
As Paul Simon said, “Still Crazy After All These Years”.
The Best To You And Your Family, David
We come full circle from a story about a woman in the 1990s that escaped from her past to a better life, and then wrote a best seller about it, to a woman who did much the same thing in the 1960s, but without the book.
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