Part 2: Gerald M. Sherman, Contact Me If You Read This
Happy Birthday, Gerry, wherever you are
You can read Part 1 of this story here.
This part is about two dramatic events in which Gerry was involved after I dropped out of Brandeis at the end of my freshman year. The first occurred after I had an illuminating encounter with a young man of an entirely different type whom I’d met in a Cambridge bar. I can’t remember his name. I’ll call him Eric Andersen.
I had never been to any bar before, until one night when I followed some people in a group I vaguely knew from Harvard Square to The Nighthawk for the first time. The Nighthawk was located between the Charles River and Central Square in Cambridge, between Harvard and MIT, and it was a cool place to go. The jukebox had Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters and a particularly funky version of “Hang on Sloopy,” but what I couldn’t get enough of were the songs of Dinah Washington, whose silky voice I had never heard before I heard it coming out of that jukebox.
Dinah’s musical complaints would always evoke a delicious longing for lost and unattainable loves I positively wallowed in. I went there a few times again by myself, and I’d nurse a Coca Cola for as long as I could. For me, it was just a place to listen to the great music on the jukebox and not be totally alone.
Boy, that guy was not cool. He sat down at my booth after politely asking me if he might join me. Then he looked directly at me, introduced himself and asked for my name. What was a nice boy like him doing in a place like that? briefly crossed my mind. Would you believe he lit my cigarette? Eric Andersen was clear-eyed and well-groomed. His dark hair looked like it had been professionally cut, and he had a well-trimmed mustache.
He began to tell me some things about himself and even asked me questions. He told he was from Minneapolis. That was an easy laugh. I said, “How could anyone live in Minneapolis?”
He asked me to explain.
I had a whole riff already prepared in my head about Minneapolis. I started by telling him that the only time I’d met anyone from Minneapolis was when I was a freshman at Brandeis. A girl in my incoming class named Marlys Moses was from there. Some other students used to tease Marlys about being from nowhere. See, I told him, it was essential to always live only where hip things were happening. Those who know where “it” was at know that real life exists only in two small portions of the country along the east and west coasts. The demarcation line on the west was drawn east of San Francisco and Los Angeles. On the East Coast, the reality strip included Boston and New York; by the time you got forty miles inland to Worcester and Albany, you’d reached the never-never land of the furthermost eastern edge of the Midwest.
I continued. Between the two ways of life there was a great gulf fixed. People who strayed off the interstate roads that connected the two habitable portions of the country were going to get sucked into bourgeois obscurity. They would then emerge on the other side of nowhere driving a Ford Fairlane V8 with a pine-scented tree-shaped deodorizer dangling from the rear-view mirror.
He listened to my spiel with a smile and said he could see how I might feel that way, but he didn’t feel that way himself. I began to regard him with deep curiosity. Here was a man who didn’t act like he had to enforce his views on anyone.
Irony note: I had no idea I’d one day move to Fargo, North Dakota for a year and then spend eighteen years in Minnesota, fifteen of those years in Minneapolis. Or that I'd change my negative judgments against living an ordinary life along the way.
Eric told me he was a graphic designer, and I was impressed. Graphic design was “commercial,” a bad thing in my scheme of things, but it was still art, which to me was an unqualified good. I told him I had wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t know how anyone could make a living at it. He told me he had gone through the University of Minnesota graphic design program on the “farm campus” in St. Paul, and he began work immediately after he got his degree. He liked his job, he made enough to travel during his two-week vacations.
I told him that I couldn’t stand the thought of being tied down for a lifetime to a job for fifty weeks a year. He said he could see why I might feel that way too, but he couldn’t stand to live without money.
By the way, would I like to go with him tomorrow night to a restaurant he’d read about in a guidebook? Durgin Park was its name. According to the guidebook that he passed me across the table, the restaurant served New England specialties in an informal setting in which all the patrons sat together at long tables and were likely to be insulted by the waiters as part of the ambiance.
“Sure,” I said. I kind of liked him even though he wasn’t hip, and I was flattered. Besides, how could I refuse a free meal? I was eating very little those days. Once in a great while I would go to one of the below-street-level Chinese restaurants near where I lived and order beef with green peppers, tomatoes, and onions, just to get a few vegetables into my diet. A few times Gerry had taken me to dinner when he found the latest groovy type of food. I remember for a while he was enthusiastic about Greek cuisine. And then Chinese . . ..
All I usually wore after work were black-striped knit shirts and black, bell-bottom Levis, like Gerry wore. When Gerry started wearing knee-high shiny black leather riding boots, I scraped together over a hundred dollars to buy a pair for myself. When I caught myself wondering if I had anything to suitable to wear on my date with Eric, I was a little ashamed of my uncoolness in being concerned with such trivialities.
Eric’s invitation felt weird to me but kind of flattering. People didn’t usually go out on dates in the crowd I moved around with. They just sort of followed one another home. But not this straight guy from nowhere.
Eric came to my rooms in Dartmouth Place on time the next evening to pick me up, and he held the door open for me as we left the building. I had decided to wear a sleeveless shift dress that I had sewed myself with my aunt’s sewing machine using a red and gold pattern fabric that looked like tapestry, along with pantyhose, a pair of red flats, and a matching red clutch bag. I even put on makeup, and pinned my long straight hair up into a French twist. Eric told me I looked nice.
After we seated ourselves at one end of a long picnic-type table covered with a red gingham tablecloth, I looked at the menu. My selection process was on the level of, “Oh I’ve heard of that, and I always wanted to try it.” Following that system, I ordered the most oleaginous, unctuous combination of dishes you could imagine.
We split a dozen oysters. They’re an acquired taste, I found later—after I’d acquired that taste. I followed that disagreeable culinary adventure with half a roast duck. The duck came with a bowl of dark, greasy, gravy along with a hill of mashed potatoes—which was holding a lake of melted butter in a crater at its top. The coleslaw side was overdressed with mayonnaise and sour cream, and my coffee was laced with sweet cream. We ate the good Italian bread that restaurants serve in Massachusetts. It was chewy but soft, white crusty deliciousness necessarily dotted with clumps of not quite spreadable butter from the ice-lined bowl between us.
The Indian Pudding I’d ordered because it sounded quaint appeared before me at the end. I found myself staring into a thick china bowl full of a mixture of cornmeal, molasses, sugar, butter, egg, and milk, topped after baking with a mound of whipped cream. After a long pause, during which I silently argued with my complaining stomach, I ate the pudding.
We went back to my place, and while we were standing and talking, I suddenly was struck with stomach pain. Soon I was writhing on my bed in front of my perplexed date.
The young man from Minneapolis chose that time to tell me what he thought of the way I was living—maybe because I was so preoccupied that I wasn’t going to be able to try to overwhelm him with a slick series of rejoinders.
What he told me was this. Looking around the narrow uncurtained room (someone had stolen the black and white Marimekko print I’d splurged on and sewed up as a curtain after I’d washed it once and hung it to dry on a line in the communal kitchen in the basement), and gazing out the window to the blackness around us, he said, “I could never live like this.”
And that was even though he didn’t know about the hordes of cockroaches that swarmed in the kitchen at night when the lights were off. Between groans, I asked him what he would do if he had no family help or contacts or money to move anywhere else. He thought carefully before he answered.
What he would do, he said, is this. He would walk down the stairs, walk out the front door, and start walking west. And he would keep walking until he was out in the open, away from the city, and all its dirt and squalor. Then he would walk until he dropped. But no matter what, he would never come back there.
Gerry bopped in at that moment, and in his ego-centric way, took over. He always made it clear that I was not his girlfriend, but he acted as if he had first option over my opinions, and he got nervous when he thought I might be introduced to some other, uncool ways of looking at the world. I could see Gerry eyeing the unpretentious stranger and mentally pronouncing him not hip. My attention shifted to Gerry and stayed there. I didn’t notice when the nice guy from Minneapolis slipped away.
In the confusion of the next few hours, I remember Gerry first tried to medicate my pain by giving me tokes of some new variety of grass he had just scored, which he called “Innerbelt Gray” or some other such facetious name. Then when that didn’t help, he took me to the Emergency Room at Boston City Hospital, where my stomach relieved itself of its problem on the black non-skid rubber rug just inside the sliding glass doors.
At first, I thought, “food poisoning!” and I thought about suing the restaurant. My family used to read with envy stories in the Boston Record American about people who had received big settlements from medical malpractice lawsuits. Before gambling was legalized, the hope of winning an insurance settlement was sort of like the hope of winning the lottery later became for many of the working poor.
But then I remembered one other time when I’d gotten that sick as a child. My grandmother had made chicken stew and being a lackadaisical cook, she didn’t drain off the fat before she served it.
From-scratch cooking was rarely done at our home, and so we ate mostly prepared foods: sweetened cereals with milk and more sugar; bologna with mustard on Wonder bread; macaroni and Velveeta; hot dogs and canned beans; canned, overcooked vegetables; and we rarely had any fresh fruit except bananas. Maybe the fresh vegetables swimming with the stewed chicken in the melted fat in the stew satisfied a long-standing need for some vital nutrients. Whatever the reason, I hadn’t been able to stop eating it. I ate three big bowlfuls before I started throwing up.
So I realized that my stomach pain and vomiting that night in the South End of Boston when I was twenty years old had been my just deserts.
I heard from Eric one more time. He called me from Minneapolis about a month later, because, he said, he was worried about me. “That's a dopey thing to do, worry about me,” I thought, groggily. I was fine. I was a brave member of the avant-garde, working to break the chains of puritan morality that bound straight society. I didn’t need his pity.
“You’ve caught me at a bad time,” I told him. “Gerry and I, you met Gerry, we were supposed to go to the Rolling Stones concert tonight at Boston Garden. My sisters are coming in from Hyde Park with their boyfriends to go with us.
“But Gerry is afraid I’ll get possessive. That’s a bad thing to be, possessive. We slept together last night for the first time since we met. I had to promise him that I wouldn’t get jealous and threaten to commit suicide. He told me from the first time we met that chicks are always threatening to commit suicide if they can’t have him all to themselves.
“The problem is that I’ve been taking downers, Seconal. You know? They’re a pretty yellow. . . . Some people are taking them for kicks, and you know me. Well, I guess you don’t. But, I’ll try anything once. Anyway, after I took one pill, Gerry told me on the phone tonight that he wants to bring this other girl he knows with him from Brandeis to the concert too. I can’t tell him how upset that makes me. I don’t want to be possessive. I wish I could be cool. I wanted so bad to have him come with me, just me, with my sisters and their boyfriends. I just wanted a normal date with him. I think I took another couple of those downers. I just wanted to forget about everything and get higher you know?
“And now I think I’ve taken too many. The ironic thing is that Gerry is going to think I tried to commit suicide because I’m jealous. I want so badly not to drive him away by making him think I’m jealous, but I think I blew it.”
I started to fade in and out of consciousness at about that point. I don’t remember how the phone call ended.
Even though I was wrecked when Gerry arrived (alone) and the others arrived soon after, we still tried to get to the Stones’ concert. My sisters rode with their boyfriends in one car to Boston Garden, and Gerry and I rode in his Mustang. When I got out of his car, my knees started buckling, and while my sisters tried to hold me up, I started screaming. When they asked me why, I told them I didn’t know. And then I started screaming again. People were staring in our direction. Gerry told the others to go to the concert without us.
Gerry somehow got me back into his car and back up the stairs to my rooms, called a poison hotline, took their advice, and kept me conscious for however many hours it took until the Seconal wore off. When a woman friend next door came in to see what was going on, he thought I would be safe with her for a few minutes. He drove off and came back with some Boston Baked Beans candy and an ice cream treat called a Nutty Buddy, and he kept feeding bits of the sweet stuff into my mouth whenever he saw I was drifting off to unconsciousness again.
I have to say this for Gerry, I owe him one. My nutty buddy saved my life that night.
You can read more in Part 3 and Part 4.
