Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles,
forget all your cares and go
Downtown,
things'll be great when you're
Downtown,
no finer place for sure,
Downtown,
everything's waiting for you
The first most amazing time that "Downtown" came into my life, it was more in my head than on the radio. Oh yeah, I heard on WMEX first, but the way I remember it best is how it played in my head. It was playing in my head when I met Ronnie Friedman in front of Sharaf's in the fall of 1964.
Oh darn! Since I'm on the subject, I might as well get this down as well. The second most amazing time that this song, Downtown, came into my life was when it was not in my head at all, and not on the radio either. It was 1979. I was returning from lunch to my job at the University of Texas Department of Home Economics. I was hung over from a night of loud music and Purple Window Pane LSD. In fact, I was so bleary that I was still tripping some.
I heard the sound of music coming not from the hills, alive, but from a stretch of lawn adjacent to the University Tower, where Charles Whitman committed mayhem. The song was "Downtown" for sure, and it was being sung by a group of students, sitting on the lawn, accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. "Nice," I thought, "hearing 'Downtown' in such a setting as this."
Then, as I passed this group to head toward my office, I heard the words they were singing:
"When you're alone and life is making you lonely you can always go - to Jesus"
.
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Sharaf's As Gang Turf
The cast of characters who took part in my Boston Years can be described, loosely, as two separate groups of players performing in a play within a play.
I don't remember exactly when I first started hanging out at Sharaf's, but I've no doubt who I was with, whenever I wasn't there by myself - it was with any one, or number of, a core group of young, aimless, unattached gay boys between the ages of 18 and 21: Joe Barry, Phaedra (Joe Lynch), Joella, Butchy Curry, Marty Betancourt, Rollie, Ronnie Driver, Wes Hunt, Jack Gallagher, George Famalitis, and me; and we were all just one degree of separation from James Elliot Roosevelt Newton, who we always called Jim or Jim Newton.
I met these kids between my first and second stays at Medfield, and, upon my discharge from the second stay (perhaps as late as June, 1964).
The second core group was basically made up of two people: Ronnie Friedman and me.
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Ronnie Friedman in 1967
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But this second gang-of-two would now and then ebb and flow with other members, all of whom were recruited from the ranks of Ronnie's college mates who shared classes with her at Emerson College which was located on Beacon Street - an easy hop-skip-jump (often literally) from Charles & Beacon. Ronnie's dorm was a bit further west and across the street from the college. These other ebb-and-flow ad hoc members included Rick Timmons (Tiki), David Branco, Billy Russell, Cindy, Renee Watniki, Adrienne LaRusso, Joe Samburg and others. These additional recruits would be folded in during the next fall semester. For now, it was the first gang that occupied our turf.
Ronnie Has A Question
It was chilly. Probably October. "Downtown" was climbing the charts and was one of those songs you would hear 20 times a day, minimum. I remember it was chilly because I was wearing a peacoat which was pretty much a must-have item during the Boston winter.
On this particular evening, I was literally dancing on the sidewalk in front of Sharaf's. A girl about my age walked over to me and asked, "are you bi?"
"No, I'm gay."
Not the least bit deterred, she asked what or why I was dancing and I replied that I was dancing to the music of the traffic in the city. And I was.
We became friends from that moment on.
As I pause this writing session I am getting ready to fly to Ronnie's home in San Diego for a week long, five-year year tradition, Thanksgiving visit.
>2010-01-23<
Ronnie was and is one of the most intelligent and giving people I have ever met. Soon after meeting her I became more self aware. Our relationship brought my own native intelligence to the foreground; even though I knew I was not exactly stupid I never seemed to consciously draw from that intelligence. It was always my wit, or wits, that carried the day. Ronnie helped change all that.
She was a tomboy, in a way. She played field hockey. She did not rely on femininity to make her way in a world that, then as now, was a man's world. It was her intelligence and humanity that made any milieu as much her territory as anyone else's.
