About Grand Avenue

Babs and Janie spent Friday night drinking on top of a roof of a restaurant on Grand Avenue eleven years later. It was hot early September night, the very end of summer; Labor Day weekend and darkness spread over the sky. The wine and the beer were taking control after a while, and Janie looked over from where she was sitting next to Babs on a picnic bench with an umbrella over it and could swear she could see Ramone sitting there, listening to their chatter, just like 10 years before.

Even though so much had happened to leave Ramone behind, it did seem strange not to have him around, lurking in the shadows like some dog they had picked up from the humane society down the street.

“We were his girls, the first.” Janie suddenly said to Babs, off the subject completely. But she could see him sitting across the table from them so clearly, and wanted to address the issue as she felt it must.

“Whose girls?” said Babs.

“Ramone’s girls. That’s who.”

“Oh.” Said Babs again, and finished off her beer. “Why are you bringing him up?”

Janie hesitated for a few seconds before she answered. But Babs was sitting right next to her, waiting for an answer. It had been years – over five or six, since either of them had seen Ramone.

“It just seems like he should be sitting here with us. I mean, didn’t he just hang around with us to absorb our conversation? Weren’t we his first artists? And, I mean, wasn’t I his first artist?”

“Were you?” asked Babs, not exactly asking to be polite, but this side of the story was never been explained to her.

“I was a sixteen year old poet when I met Ramone for the first time. He would sit hunched in his booth seat, staring at my little breasts. He really liked how skinny and flat chested I was.” Janie stared into the dark, looking over twenty years ago. She took another sip from her red wine, and stared into the past some more.

Babs was way ahead of her – Janie was one glass of wine behind, while Babs dug into another beer. Both felt like they hadn’t left the house often that summer.

“What were you doing?” asked Babs, trying to get the story told.

“Oh, waiting on him and his stupid friends. He started to pay attention to me because once he took his glasses off, and I got to see his face with his hair out of it, and his glasses off, and I told him right then and there he looked like Steve Marriott.”

“Who’s that?”

“A guitar player.”

“Oh. What did he say?”

“His mouth literally fell open. Ramone was, you know, like twenty-two at the time. He said, ‘how old are you?’ I said, ‘sixteen’. He said, ‘How do you know who Steve Marriott is?’ And I was standing there, holding a hot pot of coffee, wearing that stupid brown and white uniform and I never wore a brassiere in those days. I couldn’t even practically wear a training bra because I was so thin. But for once, he was looking me right in the face, totally astonished I not only knew who Steve Marriott was, but that I said he looked just like him.

“I said, ‘what the hell does being sixteen have to do with liking Humble Pie? They’ve been around for a long time.’ Ramone said, ‘yeah, like, whatever’ but from that moment on, he was impressed.”

Babs simply said, as if she was trying to get the gist of the story, in her flat, inattentive way, “wonder why?”

Janie explained without delay, simultaneously draining her glass of red wine. “Steve Marriott turned out to be his favorite guitar player. And Humble Pie wasn’t really that well known to an American teenager. It’s something in the order of my old poet friend Greg’s mother walking into his room one time, and pointing to a framed picture of Arthur Rimbaud on his desk and she said, ’Greg, where did you get that picture of your grandfather.’

“After we started sleeping together, a few months later, he bought me a copy of Rockin the Fillmore. I never thought about it, but for Ramone, that was like an engagement ring. It cost him all of $10.00 including tax. Years later, after our teenage love affaire came to a screeching Holt because he got tired of my sincere poetry bit, Ramone reemerged in my life again. I swear to God, the first question he asked me was, did I still have my copy of Rockin the Fillmore?”

“Well, did you?”

“No. The first thing I did when we broke up was throw it away. But right before he came back, for old time’s sake, I saw another copy of it at a garage sale, and grabbed it. Good thing too. When Ramone came back, you should have seen him when I told him that I gave away his stupid motorcycle jacket. It would fit in right into this bar!” Janie declared, drinking the next glass of wine down a lot faster than the four or five. “He acted like I had been the one who dumped him, not the other way around!”

Janie stopped the story short there, because she could see Babs’ attention span was drifting off somewhere else. It was very abstract to Babs that Janie and Ramone had once been engaged when Janie was seventeen. Babs could only see the two, as they were right then, the two fellow artists who used to hang out with her on Grand Avenue.

“Anyhow,” said Janie, wanting to wrap up the moral of her tale. “I was his first artist. Just because he has a thing against poets. Well, I couldn’t help that. Even after all the poetry he help inspire me to write.”

“But aren’t you still writing about him, Janie?”

Janie said nothing; she just nodded her guilty head. “I’m always writing about Ramone.” She said at last.