All Is True: The Naked Girl in the Tree House
Here begins a true story told in a serial manner just as Charles Dickens first published “The Pickwick Papers” (opening line: “The first ray of light which illumines the gloom…”) and Norman Mailer his novel “An American Dream” (“I first met Jack Kennedy on a double date”).
Our story opens like this:
“All is true,” I said.
Those were the first words I said to him.
“Just can’t believe it,” he said. “We’ll be in New York in less than a week.”
It was undoubtedly true. And although we were about to launch ourselves into the most terrible lie of our lives, the reality of what we ended up doing turned out to be absolutely the right thing to do.
The whole thing began on a boat, the SS United States, a luxury liner built to break transatlantic speed records and a breathtaking place to be in the early 1960s. The President was only months dead from a shooting but the Sixties were not to be stopped.
It really all started that first night in our windowless cabin, deep in the bowels of the ship. Our respective parents had booked these accommodations for their 18-year-old sons with no better idea than either of us of what we might encounter there. It was stuffy and cramped and we learned a lot about each other that dark and stormy, rock’n rollin’ night. The right stuff that we needed to really know each other.
His name was David Carpenter, “no brothers or sisters.” My name is Thom One and I’m a twin, “always looking for a brother.”
David we came from Birmingham, an industrial city in the English Midlands, known as “B’rum” by people who called London “the Smoke.” I came from Cheltenham, a regency spa known as the Queen of the Cotswolds that had just come to fresh fame as the birthplace of Brian Jones, founder of the Rolling Stones.
In the dinginess of the cabin I could almost hear David smile when I said my father was a lawyer. David himself intended to go to law school after this American adventure. I was supposed to go to Cambridge University, my twin brother to catering school. I didn’t want to go to any university because my girlfriend didn’t want me to go. Her father was a vicar and I had the idea I’d be one too some day. David said he had plenty of girlfriends. He went to grammar school, where girls also attended. I’d gone to private boarding school where there were no girls. Despite these differences in experience, however, by dawn we realized that, opposites or not, we were going to be fast friends, sharing a love of popular music especially.
Our first breakfast aboard, held In the vast dining hall (no first-class allowed), we encountered a surprise: The Painsville girls, 20 so college students heading back to school from a trip abroad. The fascination was mutual. David and I gaped at them (“is this a bevy?” murmured David) while they stared back, waving from their cluster of tables. We joined them, David and I wearing identical gray wool sweaters and corduroy pants, the girls dressed in a blaze of colored shirts shirts and denim blue jeans.
We amazed each other with our eating habits. The English way of assembling knife and at the end of a meal was quite different from the American way and the cause of merriment and a measure of obscure resentment on both sides.
Collectively they called us Brits and we called them Yanks. But by the end of breakfast we’d discovered that to a girl they were in total agreement with us that, despite its rocky start, the Sixties were going to be so good. The years still to come would leave the Fifties in the dust. And, too, by the end of the meal David and I both had selected which of the Psainsville group would be our particular friend during the remainder of the voyage and even beyond it.
This whole sea adventure came to an end, inevitably, with the approach of New York City. On a chilly March afternoon, with snow visible on the Jersey shore — American snow! — the SS United States began a swift and stately approach to its harbor on the Hudson.
As the Statue of Liberty slid by, the Painsville party plus Thom One and David Carpenter assembled on the upper foredeck and serenaded the statue with a roaring rendition of the Beatles’ “All My Loving.”
Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you,
Tomorrow I’ll miss you,
Remember I’ll always be true,
And then while I’m away
I’ll write home every day,
And I’ll send all my loving to you…
Liberty’s head turned towards at that, creakily but for sure but definitely, we all saw it. Then:
I’ll pretend that I’m kissing,
The lips I am missing …
But David caught something else, something I tried to hide but couldn’t help.
I sobbed once and a tear rolled down my left cheek.
Oh God, I didn’t any of this. I wanted my vicar’s daughter.
Kissing was as far as we’d gone but it was wonderful and unforgettable. Especially that evening in my parents’ car, parked in the monastery grounds next door, with the hooded monks gliding silently by like ghosts on both sides of the car with the windows all misted up.
Oh, God, I missed her.
Yet thanks to Liberty, my new best mate and I were about to bring something new to America by being something we were not.
Coming next: Conrad Hilton enters the picture and the boys set out to cross the country masquerading as two of the Rolling Stones.
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
No Comment