By the summer of 1968, smoking
marijuana with my friends had become a tired ritual. Each hot and empty night
followed the previous one in an endless cycle of semi-suburban tedium. First, my
fifteen year old girlfriends and I would gather on the corner of Darlington and
Flagstaff in our Pine Valley Malibu after scoring a
couple of nickel bags from the local dealer in the parking lot of the Thriftway
Super Market. We’d pile into his car and he’d chauffeur us to the house of whomever’s
parents either weren’t home or were so clueless that they would barely shift
their gaze from the hypnotic light flickering from the television set in the
center of the living room as the five or more of us dull eyed teenagers made our
way past them to their child’s bedroom or their finished basement.
That sweltering July night we ended
up at Steve’s family’s apartment. That at least was a little break from the tired
routine. Steve’s family lived in an apartment building, unlike the rest of us
whose families inhabited small split level boxes with red roofs, white aluminum
siding and black shutters. Evergreen Towers was the only luxury apartment in Northeast Philadelphia in the 1960’s and just entering
the elegant building and smiling innocently at the security guard at the night
desk added a tinge of daring to our otherwise predictable escapade.
At sixteen, Steve was the youngest
of three. His siblings were both grown men in their late twenties and his
parents were considerably older than most of ours. They were also richer, or at
least appeared to be by their lavish life style and expensive furniture. Steve
was a bit indulged too – he had two cars at his disposal – a brand new Chevy
Impala and a vintage green MG convertible. He had his own room at the end of a long
hallway and that was where we gathered to smoke pot and listen to music on
Steve’s brand new and top of the line stereo player.
I was fifteen at the time and crazy
in love with Steve’s best friend Dock. I had been in love with him for almost
two years and during that time my love had become somewhat of an obsession. I
thought about him day in and day out. How he felt about me was always a mystery
to me. He came in and out of my life at will and would go from confiding his
deepest secrets and desires in me to ignoring me for weeks on end. And while I was more than a little happy to
see him sitting on Steve’s bed, propped up against the wall and rolling a
joint, I was also wary.
I never really enjoyed being high.
I was the kind of person who was always worried about getting caught. So I was
totally paranoid all of the time. Being high also exaggerated all of my
feelings of self consciousness and I spent a good part of the time that I was
high worried about how I looked, how I was sitting, how my voice sounded whether
I was sitting too close to someone, whether I was making a stupid face. All of
this worrying took an awful lot of work. I tried mightily not to be noticed ---
not to look stupid – not to laugh at the wrong time, not the say the wrong
thing. Looking back, it was more like
torture than pleasure. Just what a
totally insecure adolescent self conscious girl
needed – a drug to increase her self consciousness.
I was just getting to the part of
my high where I was almost comfortable with myself -- the part where I could feel safe enough to
go sit alone in a corner on the floor and indulge in my favorite marijuana
induced activity – imagining that I was on a very slow moving and erotic ferris
wheel. Just when I was settling in a pleasing rhythm, Steve’s voice jolted me
to attention.
He was standing above his stereo
with a record in his hand. “You’ve got to hear this,” he said. “It will blow
your mind.”
By the time
the first song had finished playing, the night had changed – it was no longer
just another night in a string of meaningless nights – This was the night when
I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. And what a great person to listen to when
you are high. “No body feeeeeeeeeeeels
any pain” was the first line I heard sung by a plaintive voice which drew out
the syllables and teased and tantalized the listener, bringing me to the brink
of release.
“Marsha,” I thought I heard Dock say through the haze.
“Yo Marsh,” he said again , because
I guess I was too paranoid to acknowledge him the first time just in case he hadn’t
been talking to me.
“I want you to listen closely to this
next song. It reminds me of you,” he said in the prolonged silence between songs.
His words had put all of my senses
on alert. I leaned forward and felt my blood begin to pulsate through my veins
as a cascade of electric sound poured out of Steve’s stereo.
The first words of the song grabbed
me by the throat.
Yoooooooou’ve
got a lot of neeeeeeerve to say you are my frieeeeeeeeeeeend.
When
I was doooooooown you just stood there griiiiiiiining.
Yooooo’ve
got a lot of neeeeerve to say you’ve got a
helping haaaandto lend
You
just waaaaant to be on the side that’s wiiiiiiiiiiiiniing.
The rest of the song slammed me into the wall repeatedly
until by the final verse all I could do was sit numbly and dumbly accepting the
final blow.
I
wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And
just for that one moment I could be you
I
wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
Yooooou’d
know what a draaaaaaaaag it is to seeeeeeee yooooooooooou
By the time the electric tidal wave
of sound retreated I was devastated. To this day, I can hardly hear this song
without feeling the acute meanness of the words and the sadistic glee with
which they were sung. Someone else may have been the target of Dylan’s wrath
and disdain, but Dock had harnessed it for himself and redirected it at me -- barrels blazing.
Maybe even at that time, there was
a part of me that knew I didn’t deserve this attack. Maybe, a tiny voice inside
my head was trying to tell me that this had nothing to do with me and
everything to do with him and how he felt about himself. All I had been guilty
of after all was loving him far more that I ever should have and believing in
him when he hadn’t believed in himself. Once during one of our telephone
conversations that would sometimes last all night long, he told me that he
wanted to be a lawyer one day. The next day, I searched the Yellow Pages for a trophy store
that I could get to by bus and with forty of the seventy-five dollars I had
earned for a whole summer as a camp counselor, I bought him a custom made name
plate for his future legal desk. It read “Alan Dockler, Esquire.”
I can’t
remember what he said after I gave it to him or even if he said anything. I
can’t even guess what he thought about my incredibly naive gift or if he was
thinking about all that when he told me to listen to that song.. What I do
remember is that when I finally got up the nerve to look at him after the song
had ended, he wasn’t looking at me at all. Instead, he was sitting in the same
position, staring straight ahead with an empty look in his eyes.
That night, I had no way of knowing
that the boredom would soon give way to increasingly dangerous behavior and by
next summer – the summer of 69 --- the summer of Woodstock and peace and love,
these middle class white boys would already be addicted to heroin. Nor could I
know that I would soon stop getting high altogether but I wouldn’t stop
accompanying Steve and Dock and their friends as they scored and shot scag in
the same bedrooms and basements where we had once smoked pot.
In the psycho jargon of today, I
became an enabler. By the time they picked up the needle, I had forsaken the
joint. Someone had to remain alert as they drifted into their ecstatic
oblivion. Someone had to hide the burnt spoons and throw away the bloody balls
of cotton. And someone had to be there when Dock outstretched his arms to
me.
Despite his disdain for me, or
perhaps because of it, my love for Dock was a constant that he could rely on
for years. Things would change: national leaders would be assassinated, men would
walk on the moon, his father would get fired from his job, his grandmother would
die, he would get thrown out of high school, he would discover heroin and his
best friend Steve would die of an overdose and we’d go to his funeral instead
of Woodstock . I’d go to college, discover the women’s
movement, have my consciousness raised and one day in a righteous rage, send
him a letter with the lyrics to Positively Fourth Street addressed directly to
him.
I wish this
is where the story ends. I wish I could tell you that I sent this essay to the
New York Times and it was published in the “Modern Love” section and that Dock
read the essay, emailed me, arranged to meet, and we shared our life stories,
embraced and forgave ourselves for hurting ourselves and each other in the
past.
I wish that
is what happened. But it’s not. After I finished writing this, I decided to
“google” Alan Dockler. I hadn’t done that in a really long time. The last time
I had looked him up, I learned that he was married and living in Florida . This time I typed his name into the search
engine and found the MySpace page of a young man who called himself DJ Dockler.
And in a tiny line in the space marked “heroes” was written R.I.P. Alan Docker 12-28-51 - 10/7/02.
He had died
four years before and I hadn’t known. His surviving son’s name was Steven.
Sometimes
life just ends that way like this story – with no closure, only questions and
regrets for missed opportunities. And a burning need to know more.
