Abio Episode 8: Summer Romance with Jane - February 4 2024

For Sunday, February 4, 2024 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 1,063 words

Abio episode 8: Summer of love with the lovely Jane

I met the lovely Jane while working at Pure Carbon. Our attraction to each other was immediate. We’d met at a party full of college students, home on break. She was attending Marquette University in Milwaukee studying nursing, but we were both open to a summer romance.

The people at this party didn’t talk about lug nuts, vinyl siding, and squirrel seasons; they talked about philosophy, world literature, and career opportunities. So refreshing. I felt at home here. Jane and I began dating and saw each other almost daily.

Jane never let me take her home on my motorcycle. She always had her car parked somewhere, and I’d take her to her car instead. Her parents were perhaps fearful for her safety on the back of a motorcycle.

Jane had a great vocabulary. I’d been reading Poe and Webster’s dictionary simultaneously, and was open to new words. She’d tell me the names of strange diseases and odd health facts like rickettsia magumba. I was fascinated.

My dirty, unskilled factory job didn’t come up. She dressed in fine clothes, smelled great, and wore a sophisticated air. Still, she liked hanging out in my dingy room at the boarding house on Ridgway’s Main Street above Romey’s Bar and Grill, my first solo apartment. I’d moved out of my house at 16 because of the brutish Bulk.

My rent was $35 a month. The floor had six rooms occupied by single old men with financial and personal problems. We shared a kitchen and bathroom. We also had a maid, Brownie, who came weekly and changed everyone’s sheets, towels, and even rugs. My one window opened to a brick wall two feet away.

Jane was happy there, and we listened to music. She liked riding on my Kawasaki 175, and we explored trails and backroads. I took her through the Clay Mines, an obstacle course for dirt bikes. Jane was fearless and craved adventure.

That July was the 1973 Watkin’s Glen Summer Jam concert, 163 miles away in New York. “Let’s go,” I suggested. She was all for it. We packed up clothes, a tarp, one big sleeping bag and drove away. The 12-hour concert hosted only three bands – Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, and The Band; it ended up attracting 600,000 people, bigger than Woodstock.

People thought us crazy traveling on a small dirt bike, but it saved us. Roads leading to the concert gridlocked 10 miles away. Folks were abandoning their cars and walking.

To the right of the highway was a forest, beyond the guardrails. At a rail break, we drove into the forest, dodged trees, gullies, and boulders and followed the roadway all the way to the concert, to the top of the hill above the stage where we dropped our tarp between two broad trees.

The music would start the next morning, and a light rain began to fall, so we climbed into our only sleeping bag, our clothes tucked below our feet. We snuggled and smooched and laughed a lot, and that was plenty good. We felt voyeuristic. Attendees would step over us to reach the stage.

Then next morning when the concert began, many more people stepped over us. It became an endless stream, a shortcut between camps and concert. Some slipped in the mud and fell on us. We thought it funny, but scooted over behind my motorcycle for protection.

We never made our way down to the stage. The hillside was solid humans with no gaps. We didn’t mind. After the concert ended and the crowd dispersed, we emerged from our mutual sleeping bag and drove back to Pennsylvania, safe and sound, a grand adventure.

“Can I please take you home, Jane?”

This time she said yes. Her parents were out of town.

Her house was behind a 15-foot hedgerow and iron gates, one leading in, another out. It was a mansion. “Do you live here, or work here?” I asked incredulously.

“I live here. Would you like to come in?”

“Sure.” We entered through ten-foot doors into a glamorous entryway. She took me on a brief tour down the hall, pointing out the library and game room with a pool table. She pointed to another door. “That’s my bedroom. Would you like to see the kitchen?”

“Eh, no, I don’t need to see the kitchen.”

“That’s OK,” and she opened her bedroom with a canopy bed and private bath. We showered and kissed under the canopy. Angels sang overhead.

In the afterglow, I asked, “What does your dad do? Where did you get all this money?”

She waved it off like it was nothing special. “He’s the vice president of a carbon factory.”

“Really? Wow. Which one?”

“Pure Carbon,” she said. “I’m working there in the office.”

All this time I’d been dating the vice president’s daughter. She didn’t know I worked there, and I didn’t mention it.

Then it happened shortly afterward. While working in the oven room, grimy, dirty, with thick gloves, moving carbon parts down a rolling track in front of the door that led to the tidy, clean offices where the engineers and secretaries worked in suits and white shirts, Jane emerged.

Gorgeous in a burgundy skirt and short-sleeved white blouse, she was carrying paperwork to another office outpost. I was standing directly in front of her on the other side of the tracks.

We both stopped in our tracks and stared at each other. She was wearing red lipstick, I recall vividly.

“Steve,” she said with a smile. “You work here, too?”

“Yes,” I said, red-faced and dazzled.

With a flit, she turned, went on her way, smiling merrily, unfazed by my lowly status. She was intending to return to Wisconsin in a few short days.

We spent one last day together and said long good-byes, no talk about writing or meeting up again. I became lonely and alone. Melancholy set in. I missed her. I wish our summer had been endless.

One lonely night, it could have been two weeks later, I stopped in Romey’s to hang out and eat. Many of my friends were there, and I tried to cheer myself up. Few words came to mind. At the pool table stood my friend Gretchen and a strange new girl, brunette with a long-toothed welcoming laugh. Gretchen introduced me to Cheri from Brockport, 14 miles southwest.