Cynthia Dec. 8, 1985

  

A whole decade has passed since what we call “the mid-1970s.”

Hank had just gotten over – no was still getting over – his romance with Cynthia – that little rich kid from Lincoln Park that had raised such high hopes in him he could not later justify.

He 25 or 26; she 17. He kept her secret or hidden from the rest of us for nearly a year, falling in love with her after his Columbus Day debacle at the Drawing Board.

Too long without a serious relationship after his breakup with Laurie in 1971, Hank needed romance in his life again.

Different men deal with heart break in different ways. Men like me isolate ourselves in an effort to keep from getting wounded again.

Others, like Hank, go out into the world, challenging it to try and hurt him, embracing flirtations, resisting anything serious, keeping up his defenses, never letting anyone inside where he felt vulnerable – each one a substitute for the woman who got away.

For four years, he managed to avoid serious attachment, only to have it spring upon him unexpectedly out of nowhere, meeting this wealthy seventeen-year-old at The Barn theater where he sometimes performed, taking her up like a toy.

Hank fascinated her as a remnant of the 1960s when in 73, 74, 75, many felt nostalgic for those wonderous hippies. As an older man, Hank seemed more mature than the “boys” she knew, and this combination swept her off her feet – perhaps in the same way Pauly had Jane a few years earlier.

The infatuation did not last long and by last 1974, Cynthia no longer saw Hank as someone she admired, rather as someone she pitied, a washed-out singer performing local theater and supper clubs for free. She had more practical concerns such as finishing her education and as a rich kid from a well-to-do family, she could afford the best performance schools in the country.

During the peak of their romance when Hank finally brought her out to show off for his friends, I was not one of the lucky few, apparently unable to get my schedule to match with his so that I did not get to meet her for a whole year – and even then, only by accident.

Yet he mentioned her a lot, boasting about his romance with a girl who drove a white Lincoln Continental (this idea of status suddenly flooding into his old hippie self the way it happens with most old radicals who suddenly think they have missed out on something and are grateful when they get their piece of the action.) She because the love of his life, the ideal romance, the most significant woman (as he claimed) he would ever meet.

Then, in late 1974,after I had just spent the day doing deliveries for Donald’s brother’s  O’Dell Beauty Supply Store on Bloomfield Avenue – a delivery job on Saturday that I had not done again and vowed later never to repeat (although I did) when I saw a car that looked remarkably like Hank’s parked in the bus stop in front of Verona Park (the park with the ducks earlier Hank had tripped on LSD a few years earlier and from which Pauly had to rescue him). As I closed in on the brown Dodge Dart, I saw the dome light on with Hank holding out an unfolded street map with Cynthia beside him in the front seat.

Hank was trying to figure out how to get to Orange (headed for some rock event at Dodd’s.) Too engrossed in his study of the map, Hank failed to see me until I opened the back door and climbed into the back seat and told him “Take me home, taxi.”

He didn’t find the joke funny, but Cynthia did, and since my house on Valley Road in Montclair was somewhat on the way, he begrudgingly complied.

I didn’t get to know Cynthia well since the love balloon burst soon after that.  Our next extended meeting took place after (as Hank put it) she broke his heart and he began putting together music love tapes in an attempt to win her back, all of which ended up in a drunken ride to Simon’s Rock where she attended school, she finding us in the parking lot of her dorm, sadly taking us in until Hank was sober enough to make the long drive home.

She vanished from this folk lore after that into a haze of former love, but it left its mark on Hank. He seemed to grow old over night as if she had been his last chance of retaining his youth.

 

1985 Menu


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