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Without Music

Mary Ellen Gambutti

    Jesse was as conflicted and confused as her suburban town in 1969. Guys either went to college for S-2 status, filed papers to assert conscientious objection, left for Canada, or Vietnam. Like many of her middle-class peers, she was sheltered in privilege. Her parents, both college grads, Jesse was vague about higher education. She’d been on the verge of applying to college, but it didn’t seem to be coming her way. Her dad, an Air Force officer, spent Jesse’s junior year in Southeast Asia where he briefed and de-briefed pilots on missions. He returned Jesse’s senior year morally crushed and resigned from the military. He stayed in government intelligence and commuted to New York City. Jesse’s mom, a working nurse, let herself believe in Jesse’s safety and cultivated a comfortable lack of awareness of Jesse’s interests or whereabouts.
    She spent more time in her head than she did in books. She traded college for an attempted social life, resigned herself to a menial job; to what she thought might be freedom. She’d change from her nurse’s aide uniform into frayed bell-bottoms and t-shirt, and fringed moccasins. She’d brushed out her long, straight, brown hair, and left the house before her dad got home from work. She’d walk to the deli where she ordered a ham and cheese, and a Yoo-Hoo, and waited for other kids to show up. They’d hang out and talk about nothing much.
    Rich, a 1968 grad, smiled at Jesse when he arrived in his beige Dodge. Reserved and soft-spoken, and—Jesse thought—smart, he kept his sandy hair shorter than was the style and wore heavy-framed glasses. He had a pale complexion, stood about six feet tall, with straight shoulders. Rich was out of work and not in school; a bad situation, with respect to the draft.
    The kids loitered until patrol pulled up to chat, then dispersed to another hang-out. Rich and Jesse walked a couple of miles to his home, where his mom and dad watched TV in the living room. They only exchanged “hi’s” before going upstairs to Rich’s bedroom at the rear of the colonial.
    They shared a joint in front of Rich’s open bedroom window, then lounged on the wall-to-wall carpet, and played records on his tan portable turntable stereo that closed up like a suitcase. With stacks of vinyl albums and 45’s to choose from, 1967’s “Their Satanic Majesties Request” with Two Thousand Light Years from Home and the double, “The White Album” from November ’68 with Paul’s riotous Helter-Skelter were favorites. Confusion: They agreed nothing made much sense. War, riots, death made no sense. Jesse played DJ, while Rich lay back, his hands behind his head, eyes closed.
    Maybe his parents didn’t object to the music’s volume, or that Rich was alone in his room with a girl. Maybe they even knew about the pot. Jesse felt comfortable with Rich because he didn’t try to touch her. She could be herself with him.
    Sometimes he would drive them out of town, blast the eight-track player he’d hooked up to rear speakers. One night he said, “I got invited to a party in the city. Will you go with me?” It sounded cool to her, so Rich drove them over the bridge, way downtown with the music turned up. When he squeezed into a spot on a dark street of tenement buildings, dread hit Jesse in her gut. In the heat, a urine smell, as she followed him up cement steps to the door of a narrow walk-up, and into a dingy stairway. Several flights up, his pale knuckles rapped on a grubby door. Her heart pumped hard. A young woman with scraggly long hair, wearing an Indian print skirt and an oversized man’s t-shirt opened to his knock and knew Rich by name.
    The greasy odor of open chip bags, the stench of stale ashtrays, sour beer, cigarette smoke, and remnants of take-out mingled with sweat, weed, and squalor in the dim living room. A few heads nodded to greet the newcomers. Jesse glanced nervously at young men and women in shabby dress and demeanor seated on an overstuffed couch, and on random chairs. Rich was dressed in his familiar short-sleeved, button-down collared tattersall shirt with Wranglers. Jesse had on purple hip-huggers, with a brown, fringed vest over a white poet’s shirt. As usual, his posture straight and tall, Rich took a seat on an upside-down milk carton. He motioned to Jesse to sit next to him on a metal folding chair.
    Without music, the room was devoid of a party atmosphere; at least any Jesse had been to. She accepted a pipe and noticed Rich pass money. In exchange, he accepted a tiny, twisted plastic bag of white powder, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. Jesse felt hot and sick.
    A guy on the couch with bad teeth picked up a kitchen spoon from the grimy coffee table and tapped white powder from a glassine envelope onto it. He squirted water from a glass syringe into the spoon and held it over the lit candle butt that stood in a jar top. Rich tied a thick elastic band, the kind used at her hospital, around his left arm. The rotten-toothed guy asked Jesse if she “wanted some,” and wide-eyed, she shook her head fast, “no thanks.” Rich took the syringe from him, and Jesse turned away. When she looked at him again he was smiling. He became talkative. Jesse was frightened. She knew the danger; felt vulnerable, and near panic. For close to an hour her eyes said, “Please!” Finally, Rich said, “O.K., Let’s go.”
    Down at the curb, in a sleepy voice, Rich said, “You have to drive.” Now, she understood his invitation, and thought, That’s why you brought me here! Her adrenalin surged as he replied by putting his keys in her hand. She gripped the wheel all the way up the West Side Drive. Rich dozed. The first time she’d driven in the City, and it was a car she’d never driven, but she found her way onto the George Washington Bridge and onto Route 4 W. The tape player stayed off. The clock face showed one. It had been over two hours since her friend took her into a shooting gallery, and shot dope in front of her. She wondered how many times he had been there. He’d pulled the tourniquet with his teeth like he’d done it before.
    She turned off at River Road, headed north into their dark, sleepy borough. She stopped his car under the street lamp on her corner, turned away with a muted goodbye, and walked home without looking back. His Dodge slowly pulled away.
    Jesse never returned to play records with Rich on his bedroom floor. That August, a musical explosion highlighted a dream of peace and universal brotherhood, but the draft was still on. The anti-war movement peaked in November, with massive demonstrations. Nixon’s lottery followed.
    She’d had a taste of an addict’s easy betrayal. She trusted him in her naïveté but knew nothing about him. A year later she heard that Rich had overdosed in his parents’ bathroom. Jesse concluded, “...rather than face death in the Mekong Delta.”

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