Back in the winter of 1974 I was driving taxi for the Checker Cab company at night and attending college during the day. I had never wanted to further my education, but I had a low draft number and the government was still drafting young men. I had no intention of going to Vietnam.
One night I picked up a fare outside of outside the Other Side, Boston’s premiere drag bar. A young blonde in a fake fur, red satin tube and hot pants, plus hgih stacked platform shoes. I guessed her to be a teenager. She wanted to go to Brookline. A nice neighborhood. She wasn’t a transvestite. She just like dancing and felt safe with the queens. Her laugh was almost a cough. Her name was Helene. She had just turned eighteen.
We smoked a joint on the way up Beacon Street and told each other’s history. I was living in the suburbs. Helene’s house was a family commune. Her stepfather was a VP at Bose and her mother was divorced from a Boston Globe editor. They were both hippies into alternative consciousness trips.
We started seeing each other. I stayed he night. Her stepfather and mother were cool with that. So were the rest of the family. Eight children between them. It was a lot of handle for Ann and her laugh sounded mad to me.
Ann was a loving mother of six was troubled by demons, but capable of living a normal existence most of the time.
Her new husband believed in New Age cures, but one winter night Ann got hold of a bottle of vodka. The drink reincarnated her devils and she ran naked out of the house into blizzard, shouting, "I'm the queen of the snowflakes."
Spindrifts of snow swallowed her from sight.the street. The temperature was near zero.
"Get her," Helene pleaded with urgency.
"I will.”
Helene and I ran after her. Snow clotted on my face. I followed Ann’s footsteps. We found the older woman hugging a tree in the neighbor's backyard. She wasn’t even shivering. Her drunken madness kept her warm.
"Ann, you have to come back to the house." I took off my jacket and covered her shivering nakedness.
"Leave me alone."
"You'll die out here. Come with me." My bones were rattling. Helene was crying. This was all bad.
"You dare tell me what to do?" Her mad eyes grasped my face.
"I'm not telling you what to do, but Helene is worried about you."
"My daughter is eighteen and you're twenty-two.” Ann threw her head back. Her hair wrestled with the wind.
"Twenty-one.”
“Your age doesn’t matter. You’re just a taxi driver," Ann spoke with MacBeth's three witches voices. All together and added, "You are the ne'er-do well. You'll never amount anything."
"Probably not." I ripped her off the tree and dragged her through the snow to the house.
"Ne'er-do-well." She repeated the phrase all the way to her house. Each time with weakening force, but the words bit into me like snake fangs. By the time we entered the house Ann was silent. Her husband was smoking a joint. He was used to her madness.She said nothing to anyone and her husband brought her upstairs to warm her in a hot bath.
Upon reaching the second floor Ann turned and mouthed 'ne'er-do-well'.
Later Helene and I sat by the fire.
"Don't listen to her."
"About what?"
"About being a ne'er-do-well. No one is a ne'er-do-well anymore."
"I suppose you're right."
Down in the kitchen we smoked a joint and her sister made us a cup of tea. Her sister was working in the Combat Zone. Strippers didn't have snow days.
Helene and I broke up that Spring. She left me for a car thief from Hyde Park. I graduated ‘sin laude’ in the Spring. I moved back into the commune in Brookline the next year. Helene and I were just friends. Her mother slipped inland out of mental institutions. There was no cure for her madness. in 1976 I left Boston for New York.
Ann's curse had been on money. Over the years I never could hold onto anything of valuable, then again possession is 9/10ths of meaninglessness and while I might be ne'er-do-well, I'm the best of the ne'er-do wells and in these days, when life has little meaning being a ne'er-do-well is a blessing, because we know how to live with nothing.
ps Helene and I are still friends and she married a rich man. Me, I am what I am. A happy ne'er-do-well with a large family. A kucky man indeed.
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