The visit to my family in the Blue Hills had been comforting, but I hadn't said a single word about Alice's possible pregnancy. Not to my parents or sisters or brothers. At the dinner table I saw how proud my father was of his wife and family and I asked, if I might feel the same way with a little one. Alice still hasn't answered the phone. I can only imagine what she is thinking. Probably only skiing with her father.
On December 24 I walked around Boston without seeing a single woman with whom to have sex. Maybe Alice had blinded my lust in that way. We still haven't spoken over the phone. She is skiing in the Appalachians. Not exactly the Alps. Ande is my sole friend here. He askec, if I wanted to drive his father's car to Long Island. It was a better plan than hitching from the 128 entrance to the Mass Pike. I went go over to see him or Therese in Brookline, avoiding my old love Hilde, Therea's younger sister. As I got into the Olds, he asked, "Will you ever live here again?"
"I doubt it. Boston is too racist and too small."
In comparison to New York Boston is a backwater village. Amazing that I left at the age of 24 and not before. My drinking blinded me to its barren existence.
I wish I could find Linda Imhoff. My long legged divorcee mistress from 1971. I lost my virginity to her on the Charles after an Emerson Lake and Palmer concert. In plain view of everyone.
I am not in touch with any of my high school or college friends. Blonde Libby is in New York. My sole remaining college friend, Neil, has returned from his medical studies in in the Dagupan City, The Philippines. He has been in Staten Island for the holidays. I will see him upon my return. Chuck moved back to Cincinnati and the hundreds of other friends have disappeared from Boston without a trace.
My mother and father look well and they were worried about my being bored.
"Boredom is a paradise after New York."
Truthfully I hate the suburbs. Thankfully our neighborhood was situated in the Blue Hills and on Christmas morning I hiked up to the top of Chickatawbut. From which spreads the expanse of the teenage years. When I returned, my Brother Frank was in our old bedroom with his DC girlfriend, who works for the CIA. I slept in the basement.
He had put on a little weight. Regina was great, but I sense a loneliness in her, although she seemed satisfied with David. Pammie and I didn't fight once. A miracle, because it was not as if she has buried her ax of anger. Patrick suffered dizziness, but has progressed on guitar, dreaming of heavy metal. Michael was dying to tell Mom and Dad about his gayness. I said up to him, but we got through the holidays without that announcement.
In the morning I said good-bye to everyone. My mother slipped me $100 before I got in Ande's father car. I drove away without any regrets about leaving.
I drove the Olds down Route 28 to 128. I passed Big Blue, its bald summit with the weather tower and radio station such a familiar sight. A granite flat top surrounded by second-growth pines. To the north the woods giving way to my hometown and Mattapan into Boston. Big Blue haunts me. Has ever since 1960 when my mother put in the family station wagon and told me my dear childhood friend drowned in Sebago Lake in Maine. Not a day goes by without my thinking about Chaney.
After turning south I-95 cut through the Neponset River flood plain. The Interstate climbed from this depression at Sharon onto a plateau to Providence, where the highway sliced through Rhode Island's capitol to create urban blight, which lead to the white migration to the zombie suburbs.
South of the capitol the state prison stood in plain view of I-95, taunting prisoners of the loss of freedom. Hundreds of convicts locked inside to serve sentence for their crimes or someone else’s wrong. Snow topped the fields of the pine barrens, until I reached New London and the nuclear sub bases of Groton.Any view of the naval yard is blocked by a field on the high bridge. For motorists and Soviet spies. Within a half hour I crossed the Connecticut River, which I considered the southern boundary of New England. Not that anyone driving on that road was free. The next stretch were the Pines, a forest because little else grew on the primordial soil. Snow was a thin sheet over the harvested corn fields. Next up then New Haven and Bridgeport. After that New England dwindles into the Tri-State area. New York and Manhattan and the East Village.
This morning my mother kissed me good-bye and went off to work. I wish I had enough money to send them on a trip to Hawaii. Maybe some year.
At Christmas dinner my family had asked, “Will you ever return to Boston?”
“I don’t think so.”
I love New England; Maine and the White Mountains and Downeast Maine, but I had taught English at South Boston High during the bussing riots. The city of my birth was filled with racists. My old friends called me a ‘race traitor. I could fight them all. The day before Christmas I rode the trolley into Park Street. None of the women appealed to me.
I left the city in 1976. I adopted the slums of the East Village as home, even though my first friends had yet to come to New York. My good friend, Andy, was remained in Boston playing funk in an all-black band. Libby had flown to Paris to seek fame and fortune as a fashion model. I had new friends now, but I felt I would desert them too at one point.
2021 I’m trapped in Brooklyn. Covid has surged out of control, yet plenty of unmasked people wander the streets of Clinton Hill, as if they are immune to the virus, but many of my friends have been struck up by this variant despite having been vacced twice.
A road trip would be perfect except there’s nowhere I can go, as I will have a series of tests at NYU Hospital to assess the health of my liver.
I’ve been invited to ski in Tahoe, sun in Florida, and fly over to London to reside at Goodenough University. Mostly I want to see my families in Thailand, however Nu says that everything in shut down in Pattaya and Mem is concerned about leaving the house.
Oh, for the world to be free again.
