Bronx Park East Ch. 03

Chapter 2 is here. This is taking place in the summer of 1974. The couple here live in the same building and they have only known each other for a short time. They have been having their affair at her apartment when her aunt is at work.

This was rewritten with the generous help of some other members, and the file was replaced. After this, I'm done with this chapter and I'm moving on.

*******

Saturday evening was the time of the party with my college newspaper colleagues. Lenore had her hair pinned up and she was wearing green shorts. Her pants were short and tight enough to be interesting but not blatant either.

It was still light out when we took the Bx12 bus to Webster Avenue and walked north from there. Lenore didn't hold my hand. Sometimes she didn't go for displays of public affection.

At that time, the Third Avenue el, which went along that stretch of Webster, was being demolished. The girders had been removed and two rows of bare pillars went up and down the avenue. It was as strange sight, and I commented on it.

"I rode on this, a number of times."

Lenore said, "I have too." Really? Where had she been going?

I knew then that she had to have been in New York before April, 1973, the actual date of the end of service on the line. She had yet to explain much about her life previous to this summer. I didn't even know where she had been living before she had moved into my building.

Then again, I had evaded the fact of my own virginity, which actually I still had. We had just started our sexual experimentation with mutual masturbation a few days earlier. If Lenore suspected the truth about me, she hadn't yet asked about it.

I said, "It ended at 149th Street in the South Bronx, but it used to go all the way to South Ferry."

I was surprised that she seemed interested in this topic, "I know; I heard that somewhere."

"Well, the Second Avenue subway is coming along nicely." At that time it seemed like a sure thing.

She had an opinion, "Maybe they shouldn't have taken down the el until that was done."

That struck me. It wasn't just that she was female and so young. Probably half the population of New York had no idea of what was going on in the city beyond the places of their own lives. Any knowledge of what had happened before their own living memories was virtually nil, but that was a trait of Americans in general.

"Yeah, Manhattan is going to be okay, but in the Bronx it's going elsewhere." I decided to add to that, "East 180th Street; that's the place." That was about a mile south of where we lived.

She had a question for me, "So when was this built?"

I hadn't known many girls, but I never expected one to have the slightest interest in such things. I knew the answer, but I didn't want to overdo the details. It had been built in stages and then closed in stages.

"I reached Fordham Road in 1901. This section opened in 1920."

"I didn't last for very long."

"You know New York; it will be a nice place if they ever finish it." I think I lifted that from something my mother had said, and in turn she had heard it from somebody else.

Yet I was impressed that Lenore could even grasp one of my interests. It was an intense interest, although not quite an obsession. I thought then that it was a slightly weird kind of hobby, but I later found it was more common than I had thought. I was just starting to consider a career in city planning so I could work in a transit-related field.

We turned into 198th Street. The house we were going to was an old wood-frame building, two stories high. The front door wasn't locked, so we just walked in and went up the stairs. Inside the kitchen we were first met by three of my newspaper colleagues, Warren, Jeff and Eric. The last guy had a girlfriend named Martha, but the other two, I was sure, had little experience with women.

They in turn had never seen me with a girl in the year they had known me. They gaped at her; Lenore looked bemused. Warren, one of our hosts, blurted out, "You said you were bringing a neighbor."

Lenore and I both laughed at that. "She is a neighbor; she lives in my building." I had to top myself, "I met her in the elevator." I think Warren and Jeff were wondering why they couldn't also meet girls in elevators.

For a moment I felt a bit cocky and even self-satisfied although I didn't reveal that to them. Hey, guys, I can land a cute chick and you can't. I didn't consider that a month earIier I had been the same as they were now.

There was a lot of alcohol on the table. As for the drug scene, it was mostly about pot. If one was in the right circles there might be an introduction to stuff like LSD and mescaline, but I wasn't in one of those.

I have read accounts of the 1970s describing them as being saturated with all kinds of drugs. That was probably true, but the people I knew were perhaps slightly more moderate in their habits. Maybe they had some outlet in writing that satisfied them. I myself rarely drank or smoked grass except at parties. I guess my times in Lenore's apartment were sort of two-person parties.

With Lenore there at this place, I tried to be restrained and perhaps I partially succeeded at that. I knew that too much alcohol and pot together made for quite a shitfaced result. That had happened to me about a month earlier, when Warren still lived in his parent's garden apartment. When they were out for a night, he threw a party then too.

I didn't do very well with that. I was so messed up that I declined a ride back to The Bronx in the small hours of the morning. I should have called in sick at work, but some dedication made me not do that. Around dawn, I walked all the way from Oakland Gardens in Queens to the last subway stop in Flushing. A couple of buses did pass me, but I was too addled to catch them.

This Bronx event was also a typical boozy '70s college party. I don't remember anything interesting said by anybody there. I had convinced myself that these gathering were fun. They were only if one didn't think too closely about them. Thus a lot of substances were consumed in lieu of coherent conversations.

I wasn't that fond of parties per se and would have found it difficult to be completely sober at this one. Even here, most of the people were more like colleagues than true friends. We had the intensity of being young, but our connections would evaporate as soon as we graduated.

I spent the majority of the time talking to Lenore because, hey, that's what girlfriends are for. I know people, especially the men, noticed us. I'm sure some of them thought, is he actually balling her already?

Probably Lenore was uneasy because she didn't know anybody there except me. They in turn seemed to do little to approach her. I myself had once been at an event where I was the odd man out, and I knew how uncomfortable that could be. This present evening was really just several formless hours, with an occasional, even random, memorable event.

The most enjoyment I had was early on when some of us sat outside the kitchen window. We actually were on the roof of a first-floor extension. Lenore and I held hands out there and we looked at the many windows of the apartment houses surrounding the back yard. It was Saturday night, so there were people up and most of the apartments had the lights on.

At one point Eric was wondering where his girlfriend Martha had gone. Lenore and I went to look for her; we went down the stairs. On the first-floor landing, right on the floor, we found her in the arms of a guy named Mark. They were kissing, and he was fondling her ass through her shorts. Lenore just looked at me, and I knew that we to get out of there quickly and leave those two alone.

Upstairs, Eric was still worried about Martha, and we understood that it was pointless to tell him the truth and get him upset.

In the previous semester I had my own little "thing" -- not a true crush -- on Martha. But during that time, I had no dates and I was checking out virtually every woman on campus. The female staffers on the paper were around me more, so I thought about them more frequently. There were six of them, and I had my own fantasies about all of them.

Now with Lenore entering my life, I was starting to think, thank God those days are over.

Maybe an hour later -- I wasn't keeping track of time - some of us were sitting on the floor of one of the dimly-lit bedrooms. Warren had his second faux pas of the night. He had partaken too much of something, I think mostly Southern Comfort with some marijuana on top of it. He suddenly jumped up and leaned out the open window. He puked copiously; we could hear it splattering a story down from us.

Lenore was concerned about him. "Warren, are you all right?" He tried to insist that he was when he obviously wasn't.

Something made Lenore look out the window, and she gasped. "That is totally disgusting!" I went over to look. There was another wooden house very close to ours. Warren's vomit covered an outside window sill on the first floor. I commented, "I feel sorry for whoever lives in there."

I looked back and Warren was sitting right there. Probably he was too messed-up to even be embarrassed. He hung around because he lived there, but he was no longer in party mode.

As the party wound down, I was aware that we couldn't go back the apartment; Aunt Julia was there. I think Lenore was perturbed by that too. But the time came to leave; we had enough of it. I considered taking a cab, or really a car service doing illegal street pickups, but I didn't want us to hang around on Webster looking for one. I had the presence of mind to use the phone and call for a car.

As we rode along I said, "So next semester, come down and visit me at the newspaper office."

"I know what you want; you want to show me off again."

I didn't try to deny it, "All right, I'm only human."

Back at the building, we kissed for a while outside her apartment. Out of frustration, I did a lot of patting and rubbing on the seat of her green shorts.

She said, "I know, sweetie." I was sure she was going to ask me to skip work again. "How about Tuesday, okay? We missed last time."

I said, "We should also go on. . ." I was about to say, "a real date," but that sounded wrong. "We should go to The Cloisters this week, or maybe next week." That was a museum of Medieval art in upper Manhattan; it was actually a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"That's fine. I haven't been there in, I think, about four years."

We decided it would be on a weekend so that I wouldn't miss even more days at work.

*******

That Monday evening I was introduced to Lenore's best friend from Christopher Columbus High School, who was also going to attend Lehman. We met Bernice Weber at a Chinese restaurant. Bernice, what an old-fashioned sounding name.

This girl had straight dark-blonde down to her shoulders, steel-rimmed glasses, and a pink hairband across the top of her head. She was shorter than Lenore, maybe five-foot six, and more slender. Her clothes were casual, a pair of denim shorts and white sandals. The shorts went partially down her thighs, but they were tight enough to be interesting.

While Lenore seemed rather voluble -- and getting more so as she revealed herself to me -- Bernice was quieter, but I liked her anyway. I got the impression that Lenore took the lead in that pairing.

Afterwards, as Lenore and I sat on our favorite bench, she said, "Bernice was noticing you.".

"I didn't notice her noticing, or something like that."

"Oh, she was. She doesn't have a boyfriend." I wanted to ask,did she ever? But I wasn't that clear about Lenore's past either, although I suspected I was her first boyfriend.

Then she said, "Don't worry about it; it's just the way it is." She winked at me. "Just don't take her up to the apartment without me."

"I don't even have a set of keys."

Now I was thinking about Bernice. I remembered her dark-blonde hair, her denim shorts and her compact ass inside said shorts.

Lenore, why did you have to bring up this topic? But if Bernice was her best friend, then I'd have to deal with her.

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