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A 1964 Plymouth Savoy with press-button automatic gears, tail wings big enough to stuff our luggage in…

The Naked Girl in the Tree House

A Serial Novel by Mark Howell

Chapter 2

There are still American women out there who believe they were romanced by two of the Rolling Stones back in 1964, when in fact those English fellows were Thom One and David Carpenter.

How can that be?

Here’s how.

Two English boys, not yet 20 years old, arrived in New York City aboard the SS United States for a year of adventure before college.

Within the arcane social strata of Britain in 1964, David Carpenter, from the Midlands, was working class. Thom One, the narrator of this serial true story, was from the Welsh border and of the upper middle class.

Aboard one of the sleekest ocean liners of its time, these two lads spent the Atlantic crossing discovering the pure pleasure of hanging out with girls from Painesville, a group of 20 returning to their school at Lake Erie College in Ohio.

Their arrival in New York Harbor was in full throat, all of them assembled at the bow and serenading the Statue of Liberty with the best of the latest Beatles hits, accompanied by two young guitarists from Cambridge, England, who were heading for fame in Las Vegas.

Thom One and David Carpenter are peering at the dock on the Hudson and along the streets into the heart of Manhattan. We laugh at the length of the cars. This was the America we’d come to see.

We said goodbye to the girls, each one of them by name, swearing we’d see them again just as soon as we got ourselves one of those bloated cars and could set off on the open road.

But New York City was another matter. It was a city of jackhammers and cranes, whole streets under reconstruction, all glass and steel and thick with exhaust fumes. This was not the sleek American city like Los Angeles we’d seen in the movies and TV land.

This was a city no longer mired in mourning for a murdered young president but dedicated to the realization of his wildest dreams.

David and I spent our first nights in this gaudy Gotham at the YMCA, where we came across a dispiriting number of fellow Brits and Europeans whom we’d really not come all this way to meet.

At the Y we spent most of our time scouring the employment ads in the newspapers, realizing that our combined pocket money would run out sooner than anticipated. David was braver at this hunt than I was, prepared to use up fistfuls of coins telephoning in response to ads for the unlikeliest of jobs. “Swabber” at a Times Square peep-show theater, for example.

I simply considered myself unemployable.

On the second day David strode into the storefront office of British Overseas Airways on Fifth Avenue and came out hired as a ticketing clerk. But I would do the more daring thing. I telephoned my father in England, reversing the charge.

“Dad, New York is wonderful, it’s alive, the place to be!”

“That’s good, good,” he said. “So what do you need?”

“I just can’t find a job.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said. Dad was an attorney (a “solicitor” in Britain) and had to wear a wig in court. He’d once visited the White House on an international conference junket to Washington.

“Call this number,” he told me.

I took a note of it and called it right a way.

“Conrad Hilton here,” said a voice. “Ah,” I said, then steeled myself to explain the purpose of my call. “Oh for God’s sake,” he said. “But I like your accent. Report tomorrow morning at the Hilton at Central Park South. They’re looking for an elevator operator. Tell them I sent you.”

The next morning, they dressed me up in a uniform like I was the King of the Belgians, complete with epaulets and white gloves. My elevator became home for six nights a week, a place where I met the Duchess of Windsor and any number of celebrities I did not recognize. They all loved my accent except for an Irish employee who pressed the express button for the top-floor penthouse and pummeled me with his fists all the way up until I fell from the car onto the carpet at the final stop. I never did get my own back, to the fury of David who threatened to come to the hotel lobby seeking righteous revenge. I told him I’d prefer to turn the other cheek.

After a mere few weeks of regular paychecks and semi-starvation, David and I had amazingly accumulated enough cash to afford a one-bedroom apartment at number 30, Thirtieth Street.

Back at the Y, David and I had fallen in with two fellows who’d ultimately be the ones to steer us toward the acquisition of a car and complete the picture of our fortune and independence.

Billy was a tall, bulky fellow from Brooklyn and Andy a much shorter, bespectacled character from the Bronx. They loved the mix of our accents and wanted to spend as much of their spare time, which was plentiful, in our company, introducing us to Times Square and Greenwich Village, which basically meant nightlife all day. Plus Tad’s Steak House (steak and a potato for less than a buck); Horn and Hardart, the automats for all-day hanging out; plus the women’s prison at the heart of the Village with its anguished yells from above.

It was Billy and Andy who shared with us our first puff of marijuana, right there on a neon-lit midtown side street. “Do these two remind you of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg?” I asked David, “the way they look?” “No idea,” he said.

But it was they who finally put us on the road.

“Have we got a deal for you,” announced Billy one blinking, blazing Saturday on Broadway and Forty Second. “We need to unload something on you.” Andy added the clincher. “You two fine gentlemen have been chosen. No questions asked.”

We could not refuse the offer. A Plymouth Savoy with press-button automatic gears, tail wings big enough to stuff our luggage in, metallic color job and semi-bald (not bald) tires.

“Call it  $600 cash. Now,” said Kerouac and Ginsberg. The deal was sealed on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, rumored to be Norman Mailer’s neighborhood.

Done.

We were on our way.

Next week: “A Hard Day’s Night” premieres in Times Square and we seek out the Rolling Stones at the Peppermint Lounge on Forty-fifth Street.

 

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