Chapter Two (October 15, 1968) (Draft)

Tuesday, October 15, 1968

Hey, Jude, don’t make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better (1)

Crisp Fall evening. It was after eight, and Rick was still missing.

Damn him. A total jerk.

I kicked at the ground, scuffing my shoes on the pavement.

If he weren’t so cute...

"Hey, Eleanor, would you turn up your radio?" From my left, a male voice, not too deep, with a funny accent I’ve never heard before.

I turned and saw a strange dude sitting next to me, tapping his right foot, his left foot on the wall, his knee tucked under his chin. A homemade cardboard badge, with "Rent-a-Cop" written in Magic Marker, safety-pinned on his hat. He wore a plaid shirt, denim jacket, and bellbottoms, the outfit worn and ragged, the pants baggy and much too big for him.

He had long light brown hair, thin and a bit scraggly.

Horned-rimmed glasses, thick lenses–probably almost blind without them.

Not too spectacular–not even a good pickup line.

"I’m not Eleanor–she’s my roommate. I’m Jennifer."

"Oh. Sorry. But could you still turn up your radio?"

"It’s Eleanor’s radio," I said, turning it up as loud as it would go.

"Hey Jude," my favorite Beatles song, wafted out of the speaker.

Paul McCartney sings like an angel, and I don’t care if the lyrics are about shooting heroin, as some people seem to think.

"That’s why I thought you were Eleanor; I recognized the radio. So you’re Jennifer." He smiled. "I should have looked at the chick, not the radio."

He had a kind smile, showing perfectly white teeth, but one front tooth slightly overlapping the other–he seemed almost too innocent for the street, and yet he looked older, at least 25.

"That’s okay."

"No, it’s not okay. Sorry about the mistaken identity. Call me ‘Virgil,’ but my real name is ‘Jeff.’"

On second thought, maybe this guy wasn’t so strange, after all. He seemed pleasant enough, definitely not a pervert.

On the street, one never knows.

"Well, then. I’d better call you Virgil, because my family and friends back home call me ‘Jeff’ all the time. It’s been my nickname forever."

He laughed. "So how does a girl get a boy’s nickname?"

"My cousin Tim couldn’t say ‘Jennifer’; he called me ‘Jeffer,’ which got shortened to ‘Jeff.’ So I got stuck with it. How’d you get your nickname?"

"I made it up. I needed a street name, and I’m a Virgo. Seemed logical."

"I didn’t think you looked like a Virgil."

"Well, you don’t look like a Jeff, either."

We both cracked up, laughing at the silliness of it all.

Usually, I feel so awkward when meeting new people, but I felt totally comfortable around this guy.

Rick never showed up, but it didn’t really matter–I had such a groovy time rapping with Jeff–he was funny, smart, and super sweet.

He’s from East Berlin, Pennsylvania, and had been in L.A. only about a month, hitchhiking cross country because he wanted to see the world.

But, now, he was homesick for his family.

Born 1950, his birthday a few weeks before mine. At first, I didn’t believe him, but he showed me his driver’s license–he seemed so much older, but in a good way, not at all like Establishment. He lived on Hudson Street, where he rented a room from some chick who agreed to give him cheap rent in return for some babysitting.

His favorite Beatle album: Sgt. Pepper, but The Magical Mystery Tour followed a close second.

Maybe I’d see him again, though not as a boyfriend.

More as a pal.

We exchanged phone numbers.

____________________

(1) "Hey, Jude" (John Lennon-Paul McCartney)