Janet Norton

 

Many years ago, like thirty-three years ago, I was a sailor. And like some sailors & a few of my shipmates, I was an idiot.
   And now that we have that out of the way, we can get down to the story here. I mean, there's got to be a story here 'cause I sure ain't stringin' this crap together just to have another steaming pile, regardless of what you think. So, there I was. It was 1972 and I was an idiot.
   About a year before, Bob Stanton & Terry Graham, two old shipmates (and fellow idiots) from my time in Puerto Rico, discovered me sittin' in a jiggle bar down on the strip at Jacksonville Beach & took me out for a scary ride. The next available weekend, I met up with 'em at some joint in Gainesville or Orlando (I can't remember 'cause I was an idiot, see?). Anyway, we ended up standin' in the front yard of this barely furnished house that a bunch of University of Florida kids had been renting. We were in the front yard 'cause we were stoned & it was a nice day & there was a frizbee.
   Yeah, I know, everybody had a frizbee back then.
   One of the people dotting the nominally aware landscape was a beautiful young woman with honey blond hair that cancelled all my efforts to be unfocused. I kept looking at her. I think I ask one of the folks, and I remember it was Bob Stanton, who she was.
   "That's Janet. She's engaged to a Marine."
   End of conversation.
   Except that a few minutes later -- and Bob doesn't remember this -- Stanton says to me "There's nothing prettier than a healthy woman."
   As if.

So then we go through a couple more weekend scenes like that & the next thing you know, I'm out in the middle of the damn ocean, headed off to get my eyeballs yanked out of my head by French hookers in Cannes & some hey-joes in Genoa. Now I didn't get any time with the French hookers, but I did have a lot of wide-awake time from the Genoa pushers & their non-prescription stay-awake pills.
   So there I am, out in the middle of the ocean & I send a letter to Kathy Alexander expressing my hopes that she & I could get back together when I was "back in port."
   I got the letter back in a kinda "Forest Gump" sort of way.

Being thus resolutely stoved in the head with a two-by-four, I went through the rest of the cruise & gave nary a thought else to Janet Norton. But damn if the toads you lick don't get you high, when I got back to Jacksonville Beach, up pops Stanton & Graham & whizz-bang, there I am in Orlando at Graham's digs & shit-fire, up shows Janet.
   No longer engaged.
   We talked for hours. Seriously. We talked for hours, about life & love & what's this & that. Then she & her sister went off to crash with Terry.
   I slept on a pile of throw pillows in a back-room sort of screened-in porch. And you have to remember that I'm still an idiot.

Well, time she go by & I end up almost every free weekend I get in Gainesville, sittin' in Janet's living room or goofin' with her & her friends. I fell madly in love with her face, the way she smiled, the way her hair color matched the autumn sunlight. I thought about her all the time when I wasn't with her. And I never once told her how much she meant to me. I was an idiot.
   I like to say that she had feelings for me too. I like to say that 'cause it helps me feel more like an idiot, which is great if you're into self-flagellation, which, owing to my RC upbringing, I could easily be, 'cept I ain't into torturing anyone, even myself. I like to say that she did everything short of steppin' on my foot to get me to open up to her. Hell, I mean, I came that close!
   "How close?" you say, posing a rhetorical question.
   Well, how about she decides to fix me a dinner. Bake potato. Steak & beans. You know, the kind of meal that a garden-variety college student (or even an idiot sailor) would appreciate. Home cooked meal. So we went to the store & got the grub & came home & fixed it. Her and me. Nobody else around. At all. Janet Norton & her idiot.

We went to a movie once. It was either Clockwork Orange or the movie that came out in the early 70s where Mick Jagger plays this guy who dyes his hair red so he'll go to jail instead of some crook with whom he sympathizes. I remember the Clockwork Orange movie special, but I think that one I saw with Joy Eastman. But that's another story almost as lame as this'n.
   So there we are, Janet & me, standing in line with a bunch of other college kids, waiting to get into the movie. I'm standing there trying to fit in, short hair & all, a sailor on liberty with a fine-lookin' young lady. Sometimes someone would walk by & say hello to her. I think she introduced me to a couple folks. That kind of deal.

At which point in this shabby tale, the idiot enters, stage right.

I'm standing there next to her & I put my arm around her, my left hand clasping her shoulder. I stood there like that for what was probably less than thirty seconds. I remember mouthing the words "Man, I am so stoned" before removing my hand from her shoulder once & for all.
   Yep, you heard me. I took my arm from around her.
   Like I said. I was an idiot.

At some point in the following weeks & weekends, I suddenly find myself again in Janet's living room. There's the usual tribe of hop-heads there, plus one other guy with long hair sittin' very close to Janet with his paw on her thigh.
   It must have been obvious, my sudden consternation.
   This guy, named Billy, who was Janet's sister's partner, he & I, we had a kind of motor-head friendship going, he takes me aside and says "Let's go for a walk, man."
   So me & Billy, we head out the door & wander off to whatever. The subject of women & relationships was in the air, like, you dig? Being an idiot has that one drawback: some people can see right through you like you were a window ain't got no glass in it. So during the four or five block walk that Billy & I go on, he talks to me about how relationships can fall apart if you ain't watchin' good. And I agreed with him. Somewhere inside my little idiot skull there was a neuron that went "Whatever" and that was it.
   So eventually me & Billy, we show up at this large old house that'd been turned into apartments for hippie students. On the first floor just off to the right was a large room where a woman by the name of Joy lived. We went in and sat down. I think we passed something around with a couple other folks who were there. After about maybe twenty minutes, Joy pipes up with "Billy! When did you get here?"
   It was that kind of life, see?
   Well, Billy introduces me & Joy & I hit it off pretty well. I got into some kind of doper dialogue about having music as sound become light ("I can hear the colors melting!") & other technobabble. Pretty much dream-head idiot stuff.
   Now this thing with Joy, it was pretty much like the platonic deal with Janet. Maybe more. Maybe less. Either way I end up spending more and more time at Joy's digs when I go to Gainesville & we got to be pretty damn good friends. Not sleepin' together friends. Damn good friends.
   And Janet?
   Do you have to ask? I still held these deep feelings for her.
   On and on like that until the last toad gets licked and everyone goes off to sleep it off in a hallucinogenic forest of their own design.

At which point I must remind you that I'm still in the USN at the time & now & then the ship goes out for a couple weeks to check out how the modifications & updates are gonna work. So there are these week & two-week strips of time when neither Janet nor Joy are present, physical or philosophical, in the scene.
   Also during this time (and this was back before the USS Cole got blasted & all that), the USS Saratoga goes out on a one-day "dependents' cruise." Sailors could invite one of their friends or their parents or kids & wife or whatever to see how the ol' ship she works. I invited Joy.
   So Joy shows up & we spend the day watching planes fly off the deck & blow up fish & all that. She was, as you'd expect for that time & place & for the person she is/was, a bit put off by all the militarial stuff. Me? I always had a ratiocination. I was an idiot, remember?

And then the day arrived when the USN & I parted company. March 28, 1972. So Steve Flora, a shipmate, & I got on the Greyhound in Jacksonville, as I'd done many times before & went off to Gainesville & ended up at Joy's digs. The next couple days, before I left Florida for Ohio, Joy & I and Steve wander around & goof on stuff & act generally whacked. At some point Billy finds me & says that Janet knows I'm leaving & she wants to see me. So we go to where she is.

I have this vibrant memory, now tempered by nostalgia, of Janet standing in a kitchen doorway with the light from the kitchen passing through the sundress that she was wearing. She's leaning against the doorframe, looking out across the dark room where I stood, my hat in my hand like a penitent. That memory, like some beautifully lyrical John Coltrane solo, that memory confirms my being an idiot.

For a long time I thought about Janet on an almost daily basis. For the next twenty-and-some years, I don't think there was a week went by I didn't remember her standing in that doorway. But a couple years ago I discovered that a person named Janet Norton had died in Zellwood, Florida, at the age of 47. I let that knowledge into my head & it pretty well took care of my remembering Janet in any other way than I do any of the other folks I've known who are no longer among the living. Maybe ten years.
   But this past Solstice season, more because I learned that an old friend was dying of cancer than because of the angle of the sun reminded me of why I was an idiot to leave Florida, and perhaps because of the approach of my 66th year, I started remembering this & that about Janet.
   I remember the setting of the room & where she was standing when I asked her, probably too abruptly, how old she was. I remember the look on her face, the way she turned around and looked at me. And I remember she was a few years younger than I was then. Maybe four or five.
   For years I lived with a suspended hope that I might be wrong. That the name in the obit is the wrong Janet Norton.
   Then, just this very day, by the grand graces of the InterWebs, I finally zero in a search for the obit of the person I've been mourning for years. It isn't her. It's another Janet Norton, some other person with that name and a completely different life, surviving family members and all. And the past years of sadness have been -- as is usual for idiots -- for naught. Perhaps Janet is further lucky. Perhaps she is alive and well somewhere, living a happy life with friends and family.   And perhaps, like the words in the old Fred Neil song, Dolphins I have to wonder if she might pause in her day and perhaps, as I do for her relentlessly, think of me.

At which point today's idiot looks back at his idiot past and wonders if there are parallel universes where things turn out very much differently but with the same cast of characters. There's probably one where Janet's the idiot, although I'm loathe to suspect that such a dimension exists. And there's surely one where I'm not even in the picture. Maybe I'm closing in on death instead of Kathy. But I'm hopin' most that there's a parallel dimensional place where I leave my arm around Janet, my hand pulling her closer to me. It's the dimension where she looks at me and smiles that elfin grin and the dimension solidifies. The idiot never exists.