Old Friends and Old Flames

Over the years of my life I have seen friends come and go. I never had big groups around me. In each phase of my life I had a few good friends, people who I could relate to well and vice versus. Often these came out of categories of life: friends from work, church, school, etc. I had friends I grew up with and social friends I met here and there. Many of my friends were writers, poets, artists, musicians, playwrights and actors. This was true in my days living in Philadelphia and later in Delaware. Many friends have disappeared over time because they or I moved or we changed jobs and some died. Circumstances of the world we live in dictated some of this.

There are some who I can call lifetime friends, knowing them and communicating with them since early childhood, even infancy, to today: Iva Darlington, Stuart Meisel and Ronald Tipton especially. They are some old classmates still in my universe, and even some relatives that were friends then and now and friends not because of blood.

Here is a compilation of my friends from near birth until now when I am mush closer to death. Most are old friends, but some are recent and current.  I have probably missed including some and I apologize' although, maybe they are glad to be missed.

I originally was going to do a second and separate set of my old flames, but changed my mind and just intermingled them with the rest. Some of these were like passing ships and some I was very seriously in love with. Some even broke my heart. Some have passed away; in fact, several, just as several of my closest friends have gone on to some other place than here on earth. Some I have no idea where they may be.

I would have liked to played Simon and Garfunkel's' Old Friends, but you know, copyrights get in the way.

I can leave it with the poem I wrote that gave me the title of this blog:

Time II

Speak of the good days

And all the good times

Quickly.

Time marches on.

Drink the fine vine.

Lift up your cup, be drunk!

The grape was a good year.

Drink long and deeply sample.

The grand year is nearly drank.

Reminisce good times

Over our good wines.

All the good times, if they were,

They are less dead.

The good times are memories

In the drinking of elder men,

As if they exist.

Exactly as if they were.

From the collection, Lost Laughs and Last Lovers

Drinking in New Jersey and other Diversions

 Since I was now earning a decent amount of money, I purchased a bar for our apartment. Somehow we had come to believe having a well-stocked bar in your place was the height of sophistication. It was a status symbol of success. Our bar was very well-stocked with a large variety of booze, Wild Turkey Bourbon, Bacardi 151 Rum, Smirnoff Vodka, Crown Royal Whiskey, Dubonnet, Galliano and many more. I had several mixology books and by the time we were high up in Cherry Hill Towers getting high, I had gotten a handle on making cocktails. Back in Philadelphia at the Commodore I almost killed Lois one night.

Lois’ drink of choice was a Manhattan, so this particular evening I decided to make her one. I had bought a little cocktail kit. I took the shaker and added some ice. I opened a book I had and read the recipe. It said use 8 parts whiskey to one-part Vermouth. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I assumed a jigger constituted one part. I added in 8 jiggers of whiskey and one jigger of vermouth. Dashed some bitters on top, put on the lid and shook that baby up. I poured it out into a glass and she drank it down.

Talk about woozy drunk. She staggered about and announced she felt sick, then headed into the bathroom to throw up. There was a loud crash and I hurried after her. She lay upon the bathroom floor where she passed out after falling head first against the toilet so hard it cracked the tank.

 We didn’t see them quite as often, but we did continue getting together with Bill and Grace weekly for our usual evenings of cards and drinking and listening to Bill pontificate about harapozoids. These were sometimes raunchy, but never oozed over to any group sex affair.

Besides the Stones, we still got together with Joe Rubio occasionally.  These were more on the order of normal suburban life, cookouts and cocktails and a lot of chit chat about jobs and trips.

Wayne and Bunny were out of the picture. It helped us split with them when we disappeared across the Delaware River into South Jersey, new address, new telephone number and not long after, a new employer. We certainly never had a nude Bunny at the front door or heard from them again.

At the my employer, Welder Tube, I met a fellow who would become a close friend for most of the next decade. His name was Victor Ernest and he had originally immigrated to the USA from St Lucia. He had a interesting accent. Lois thought he sounded like Grover, one of the Muppets on Seseme Street.

 He had been with the company for a few years in the position of Cost Accountant. His grade was above mine of Assistant Bookkeeper when I started. Yet in a few months our roles became reversed. He was still the Cost Accountant, but I was now his boss. He had no difficulty with the situation for the most part, although he preferred to keep it quite that I was his boss, even pretend it wasn’t so. Despite this, we become close friends and he remained such for the next several years. We were together a lot, certainly at work, but socially as well. We began playing tennis every lunch hour, putting up a makeshift net of string between lamp posts in the parking lot. We also took up golf and played every weekend. Sometimes we even got together on weekends and played tennis on a real court.

We were just average weekend golfers. My best score at a full-sized golf course was 95 at the Westwood Country Club in Woodbury, New Jersey.  This Club allowed the public to play their course. It was a lovely course. We were playing there one time when a sudden thunderstorm came roaring in overhead.  It was something of a dilemma as we were on the far back end, a long way from the clubhouse and any solid shelter. Mostly this was open field. They tell you not to stand in an open field during lightning, but the only thing around was a solidary tree, but they also say don’t stand under a tree in a storm either. All we did was walk a bit of a distance away from our bags of metal clubs.  I’m here writing this, so obviously we survived the incident.`

 Usually we played at an Executive Golf Course, called the Golf Farm. An Executive Course had nine holes, but two cups cut into each green. You played the nine, then played them again but to a different cup to make your 18-hole course. We played here because the green fees were pretty cheap and Westwood's were pretty steep.
The golf farm bordered right up against a private country club. One day as I came along the fairway near the drive into that club, this guy stopped along the side and took his club and some balls from his trunk. He began driving them directly into the Golf Farm course, darn near hitting me. I yelled at the jerk, but he kept hitting his drives anyway. Finally, he got in his car and continued on to the country club parking lot.

One time we were playing a round at The Golf Club when we came up behind two women. Instead of just waiting for them to finish a hole, we suggested playing as a foursome. After the first nine, Victor headed to the rest room and one of the women also trotted off somewhere. After chit-chatting with the pretty dark frizzy-haired lady with a spectacular figure, she suddenly suggested we go to her apartment, which was just down the road she said. , She would make us a lunch. Then she began to tell me her husband’s business kept him on the road for long stretches and he was away and how lonely she was. I turned her down on her offer of lunch and the other two returned and we finished the back nine.

I had taken the lady’s offer at face value, just a lunch thing. When I told Lois about it later she gave me a look, shaking her head. “You are so naïve,” she said.

As far as my scores, I didn’t measure my improvement by those. I measured it by how many balls I loss. When we first began we would lose several, either in the water hazard or in the rough. Eventually I reached a point where I was finishing with the same ball I started with and then I felt I was really improving.
Victor particularly hated to lose a ball anywhere. They cost money, you know, and he was a bit tight. He would tramp about in the woods or roughs for a long time before giving up on a ball and if he couldn’t find it he was unhappy. I might look about a bit if I lost a ball, but was willing to continue with a new ball rather than spend time searching. I preferred playing.

Psychologically the worse hazard was the water hazard. The Golf Farm had a lake you had to tee off over. The distance you had to clear was usually easily carried on any other hole, but staring at the water drained away one’s confidence and more likely than not, we would drive our ball straight into the water. Victor really despised this hole. On one occassion he sunk ten straight balls into the water where they disappeared forever. (Actually, they weren't lost forever. There was a guy who came around with a snorkle and fished all the sunken balls from the bottom, which he then sold to golfer for a low price.) Victor and I eventually went to a driving range and bought a bunch of used balls floaters. These balls did not sink. They floated about like strange round white fish and you could sometimes fish them out of the drink. I carried in my bag a special tool for just just a thing. It had a cup at one end and a telescoping handle that could be extended out about ten feet. 

Vic was kind of obsessive-compulsive. He lived by a pretty rigid schedule. He couldn't get together on Tuesdays because this was laundry day. He was fanatical about his appearance and festidious in his grooming. He would arrive at work and head right to the men’s room where he would wash up and fuss with his hair and beard, even though he had showered and groomed himself at home. He often spent 45 minutes in this ritual.

His pride and joy was his yellow Porsche 914. He used to park it right next to the office along the driveway instead of back in the parking lot. He didn’t want anyone parking near him that might ding or scratch his baby.

The structural steel tubing was fabricated in the long building behind the offices. Flatbed 18-wheelers would come in through the front gate, turn up the drive and deliver these great coils of steel to the plant. These coils were very large and very heavy. One day we heard a loud thud just outside the offices. We ran to the windows. Somehow as a truck turned onto the drive, the restraints gave way and one of these giant coils tipped off the side. It made a large dent in the driveway macadam and only missed Victor’s little car by a couple of inches. He never parked along the drive again. Better a couple of dings than a pancaked car beneath a steel coil.

Victor had a girlfriend named Marsha, who he eventually married, so the four of us, he and Marsha, me and Lois, did a lot of things together, but there was no sex involved in this relationship. There was still drinking at his parties.

That was a mainstay of our socializing throughout the early 1970s, parties and plenty of booze. Victor’s parties never got as drowned in the stuff as at Bill and Graces, no one got falling down drunk. We mainly loosened up and spent time singing and laughing. The guitar Victor is playing was mine, but he actually knew how to play it.

We were to continue reveling with this group of friends from 1973 to the fall of 1975 when something would happen that changed everything in my life. I had met Joe Rubio in 1967 and he was still a friend in this period. Victor Ernest became a close friend in early 1973. Both of these would still be friends into the 1980s. Our boozing with Bill and Grace began in 1972, but ended in 1975. Our sexual dalliances with Wayne and Bunny had begun in 1972, but were over by 1973 when we moved to Jersey.

This did not mean our risky sexual proclivities ended.

On September 15, 1973, Lois and I headed to Wisconsin on vacation. It had been a long time coming that we earned enough to afford a real vacation. Our last real one had been the trip to

New York and the tour of Virginia in 1962, our second year of marriage. Since then we had taken a number of day trips, a few overnight stays and one drive out to Cleveland, but that was hardly a vacation since we just drove straight to that city and then straight back home. This was a ten-day trip across several states. The first leg was sort of a dash northwest on interstates, crossing Ohio on up through Gary and Chicago, with no stops. We then went right up to the Wisconsin Dells, after a side trip to Baraboo because I wanted to see the Circus Museum there. We stayed in the Spinning Wheel Motel one night there (right).

Circus had long fascinated me, especially the Ten-in-one or sideshow or Freak Show. Circus World is a museum dedicated to the history and all things circus. Owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, it was built in Baraboo because that was the home of the Ringling Brothers. Ringling began their first circus tour out of the town in 1884.

From there we went to The Dells for a couple days. My regret is I had a fairly new movie camera at the time and I took a lot of films on the trip and not many photographs. I still have the films in a metal box, but nothing to view them with since I got rid of my projectors a few years back. If I ever have any spare money, I will take my movies to a place that can convert them to DVDs.

We took the long way home, cutting through Minnesota, then Indiana. We found a wonderful little local bar restaurant in some small town in Indiana. It wasn’t a tourist destination, but a place where the locals ate. We also had some car trouble in Indiana. The carburetor needed adjusting or something, but we were able to get it fixed quickly and continue our tour.

We began driving through Iowa. I decided we would continue into Missouri and stop over at Hannibal where there was a lot of Mark Twain stuff to visit, but we didn’t make it. After hours of driving through repetitive flat farm land and hearing obituaries being read on the radio along with pork belly market reports, we made a left turn east halfway down the state and headed home.

One of the few pictures I did take is of Lois in the Redwood Center Motel in Angola, Indiana. If much of our life sounds typically humdrum, the drinking and parties aside, our sexual behavior was not. For instance, I often parted the curtains slightly when we stayed in motels on the idea people might peek in and see us making love. Our risk taking sex life continued in these years, just as I continued buying pornography and going to the xxx films or strip shows.

Several of the adult bookstore now added cubicles or booths in the back where you could view pornography movies in private. Some even added such booths where a curtain would part revealing a naked woman who would do “tricks” for you as long as you pushed money through a slot. Sitting in those booths viewing such “performers” as Annie Sprinkle (use your imagination), I never gave a thought to all the previous men who had sat on that bench doing whatever they might be doing while watching a filthy film. The films weren’t the only thing dirty about such places, the interiors were none too clean either.

And at the end of 1973, we were moving again.

Old Friends, New Friends, Booze Friends and Nude Friends

Joe Rubio mustered out of the Army in February, but for a while he was a recluse holing up at his parents. (Left is John and Joe Rubio) visiting us at Lansdowne Towers in 1971,

He barely spoke to anyone. Despite the upbeat nature of most of his letters, which made it sound as if he was safe and sound in some off the front base, this was not the case. There were more things going on than he spoke of or wished to talk about for quite a while. He had written about being struck by lightning as the radio man, but he had never mentioned the instant that occurred just after he took over that assignment. He was following behind the platoon lieutenant, who was walking point when they were caught in a Viet Cong ambush. A shell of some kind whizzed past Joe and blow off the lieutenant’s head.

Joe who had resisted being drafted came home highly decorated. Among his metals were a Bronze Star with three oak leaf clusters, a Battalion Presidential Citation, Five Air Metals, Vietnam National Metals and a Purple Heart. One of the events that earned him the Bronze Star, and probably the Purple Heart, was when he deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire in order to divert the evacuation of his fellow troops by helicopter.

After he revived from his war experiences, we picked up our friendship pretty much where we had left off; although, Lois and I were making new friends who we probably spent more time with, but our friendship with Joe grew greater later, especially after he got married. He met and married Linda in late 1972. (Photo of Joe and Linda on Right.)
They moved to a small house on the edge of Drexel Hill and during the early to late ‘70s we continued to get together at their place or ours. We also took some little trips together, such as to the Pennsylvania Dutch area of Lancaster county (left).

These were our “Norman Rockwell” friends, clean living and generally sober, even though get togethers did include a good bit of imbiding. In 1973 Joe and Linda had their first child, a girl they named Meredith after me.

This was the second child of a friend who was given my surname. Stuart Meisel’s first daughter, also born in 1973, was named Adriane Meredith Meisel (her Hebrew name is Shulamit Mahlka). 

Ironically enough, Stuart was also living in Cherry Hill at that time, but neither of us knew it. (Photo on left was at Adriane’s 1987 Bat Mitzvah, back row is Stuart, his wife Fyllis Sunshine; front row is Ariane Meredith and his youngest daughter, Leslie.)

Stuart’s and my life seemed to run in odd parallel during our early adult years. For instance, beside residing in Cherry Hill at the same time, we also resided in Drexel Hill concurrently and we were attending classes at Temple University simultaneously, but our paths only crossed once when we met each other on Temple’s campus, he entering a building as I was exiting. We only spoke briefly.

Anyway, our friendship with Joe and Linda Rubio lasted until 1978. After the Army, he returned to his job at ARCo. In the late ‘70s ARCo closed its longtime headquarters on South Broad Street in Philadelphia and moved home base to its offices in Los Angeles. Joe stayed with the company and moved his family to California.

Letter from Joe and Linda: “So you want to hear what it’s like on the West Coast? I’m almost too embarrassed to tell you about our gorgeous weather this winter after hearing about all the snow and cold  weather back East. But since you asked – it gets to about 70 to 75 degrees every day and very sunny. At night during this time of year it drops to about 48 degrees to 55. This Christmas we spent with friends and we went swimming in their pool. The water temperature was heated to about 80 degrees, Can you imagine – swimming on Christmas Day!”

From Linda: “Both Joe and I love living out here. We’re about 40 minutes from the beach and about ½ hour from the ski resorts. It’s a strange feeling to choose between the beach or the snow in the same day!”

            Joe and Linda came East for a visit in 1979. Meredith

Rubio and Laurel Meredith got to meet each other, but both were too young to really remember this. After the Rubio’s returned to California we sadly lost contact with each other. 
           

I don’t know how Joe is. He probably is retired by now.  In 1985, ARCo spun off the East Coast stations as Atlantic Petroleum. These in turn were acquired by a Dutch businessman named John Deuss, who sold them to Sunoco in 1988. In 2000, the rest of ARCo was completely merged into British Petroleum, except for the Alaska operations, which were purchased by Phillips Petroleum. The ARCo pipe line was acquired by TEPPCO and ARCo ceased to exist. I am not sure where Joe ended up. Picture on the left was of Laurel, Meredith Rubio and Kristen Rubio on their visit East.)

During this same time period we spend a lot of time with

Bill and Grace Stone. We got together  two or three times a week, mostly gathering in each other’s apartments to play pinnacle and watch the Flyers on TV, and drink. (Photo right is in their apartment at Lansdowne Towers; Lois on left, then Grace and Bill pouring.) Drinking was at the center of all our get togethers and our two couple parties would run late into the evening. Most of them ended the same way, with Bill passing out and having to be carried back to bed. It was amazing how heavy he was when dead drunk, because he was a fairly skinny man.  Fortunately, I don’t think I ever had to carry him from our apartment to his. His blackouts seem to limit themselves to his own dwelling.

When he really got into his drunkenness, we all could recognize it. He would be fine, then as the beer took effect, he would begin to babble about “Harapozoids”. I have no idea what a harapozoid is, but the word seemed to mean something to him. Perhaps when they visited at our place and began speaking of the harapozoids, Grace prodded him to head home before he did pass out.

This was much the routine from the June in 1971 when we met through the first half of 1975. We didn’t quite get together as often after Lois and I moved to New Jersey in 1973 and then after the Stones moved to North Jersey a year later.

Meanwhile, we drank away our evenings. I was not effected

by alcohol as Bill was. He always lived up to his name and got stoned by evening end, mostly on beer. (His nickname was Stoney.) I never liked beer. My drinks were usually mixed cocktails involving rum, bourbon or whiskey.

For a while it was the fad drink, Harvey Wallbangers, which employed vodka with orange juice and Galliano, a sweet liqueur. Lois was generally Manhattans. I could guzzle down cocktail after cocktail and show no apparent effect. I did not slur my speech, didn’t wobble or waver, never passed out or threw up, and always knew exactly what was going on. I woke up remembering everything from the night before and I have never had a hangover. One night, Bill ran out of liquor and he and I made a run to the State Store (Pennsylvania, you know) to restock. He looked at me and grumbled.

“I don’t get you Meredith. You drink and drink me out of booze and you never get drunk.”

Must have been a metabolism thing.

Bill was a sometimes scary guy, not big, maybe close to my height, but very skinny. His thin body was festooned with 72 tattoos, back in a day when tattoos were a rarity; in fact, generally tattoo parlors were illegal. You could find as much porn in Philadelphia as you wanted, but you couldn’t have a picture needled into your body.

He had a lot of stories about his life, claiming he once played semi-pro hockey in Canada and flown a helicopter as a mercenary in the earlier days of Vietnam. He also hinted he had killed a man. I don’t know if everything he claimed was true or not, but there was a definite edge about him. He was ten years older than the rest of us.

            The hockey thing was something he considered himself an expert at and when the Flyers appeared on TV we had to have the game on and he would do running commentaries between beers and pinochle hands. One day the four of us were cruising about in

South Philly when he shouted, “Stop the car.” I was driving and I stopped, probably a mistake. Ahead of us a street hockey game among groups of younger teenagers was in progress. Bill jumped out of the car and grabbing a stick from one of the kids, joined in the game; although, most of the kids stepped back in shock.

I wasn’t much interested in the kids. I was eying the mothers sitting or standing on the surrounding porches, who did not look amused. When I saw one go in the house I figured she's going to make a phone call. I ran over, grabbed Bill’s arm and wrestled him back into the car. I wanted us out of there before the police came.

This was not the only time I was pulling Bill out of situations. There were times I would shove him out of an East Lansdowne Bar before the fights started. He was good at pushing people’s anger buttons.

Bill’s big hero at the time was Archie Bunker. When we got together, if “All in the Family” was on TV, we had to tune in. Bill would sit there and say, “You tell ‘em, Archie”.  Norman Lear was acclaimed and won awards for this supposedly “realistic” show, but frankly, the Bunkers were no more representative of American families than “Father Knows Best”, and I much prefer the portrayal of the Andersons. Critic saw the bigoted character of Archie Bunker as a satirical image and put down of such behavior; however, there were a lot of people in the real world who looked upon him as a hero, someone who told it like it is. Lear followed this with “The Jeffersons”, which frankly was more in the tradition of “Amos ‘n” Andy” than liberated.

When we lived in Cherry Hill the Stones came over and we

all went out to dinner together. Not far from our apartment was a racetrack, Garden State Park. They ran both thoroughbred and harness horse races there. We were living directly across from Cherry Hill mall in what was known as the Golden Triangle along Route 70. Right next to the race track was a large hotel called the Cherry Hill Inn, which was a fine white tablecloth restaurant.

This restaurant was pretty chic in its day, with valet parking and well-dressed waiters. It was here we chose to dine. Bill wore an off the rack dark brown suit with kind of gold piping, rather garish. We got seated and when they took our drink orders, Bill asked the waiter to have them put some extra olives in his martini. A few minutes later the waiter returned and place a dish full of olives before him. When we got up to leave, he went over to the waiter and shook his hand.
After we left and got in the car, Grace revealed she had

snatched the silverware, salt and pepper shakers and a couple other items and brought them out in her purse. Yes, we were class all the way.
Bill died a few years back; I do not know what happened to Grace.

I had stopped believing in God and I didn’t expect we would ever have children. Even though Lois had those operations in March of ’71 where they sewed up her cervix, it hadn’t worked. She had miscarriaged another baby. It was only in the fourth month, so wasn’t considered a still birth. I had concluded the only purpose in life was to have a good time, thus we did our best at partying our way through the early ‘seventies.

In the fall of 1971, through happenstance, we met and began a friendship with Wayne and Bunny. This kicked our sexual proclivities up a notch or two and gives the final term to our chapter title.