DREAMING OF MELINDA, 1964

It is an old dream. I've had it before. Mere reportage from years ago. Times were so different. I guess it came to me at two ay em because I saw a girl on the six o'clock news that looked like Melinda did back then.

There I am, driving that old Chevy with the wings on the trunk. Pulling up to her cheap motel room.

She called me crying, not twenty four hours back from Hawaii, where she had been hidden from me  - no letters, no words.

"Please, I need you." ... all she had to say.

I borrowed two bucks from my dad for gas and drove along the coast from Long Beach as fast as a 283 with a four-barrel can push itself up PCH.

She's wrapped in a dirty green silk camisole and half slip. Her face is red-puffy and her hair knotted and greasy. There is a wild, dark glitter in her eyes. And her kiss tastes better than I remember, better than anything.

I wipe her nose, and fluff up the pillows on the damp bed. She is compliant as I push her down into them. I sit on the edge of the bed and rock her softly in my arms, feeling the heat radiate out of her.

"My god, you're burning up."

"Umm hmm," she nods, trying to fight off the old memories that are rushing back at us.Trying to snuggle close; trying also not to let the fever win. Trying that the hardest. 

There's a bottle of prescription pills on the night stand, a general first-aid look of the drugstore stuff scattered around the room. When I go in the bathroom, the pads tossed in the wastebasket remind me of bloody field dressings. They are.

She looks across the room at me with a programmed guilt all the girls had to display back then, and said some words probably originally written for Sandra Dee.

"I couldn't have the baby. You know I couldn't."

She has no one. "The guy" was some sailor out at Diamond Head. Probably took my baby blue Weber surfboard from her, too. I don't ask, don't need to ask whether her parents kicked her out or if she just ran away and hid it from them. It would have worked out the same, either way. There was such an inevitability about it all, back then. There was yelling, there was harsh judgment. And God forsook her in about five minutes.

She has no money. The last hundred and a half for the back alley was borrowed from Ellen, who wouldn't help in person, Melinda sobs. (Can't get too close to the "bad" girl.) But a hundred and a half is a lot of money, anyway. In my dream, I get to remember that Ellen hasn't had her own abortion yet, it is still in the future. I will pay for that one myself, and never remind her of ....  

The present me, watching this dream, knows the price for, ... for all of them, in karma. Mine so very much smaller a part of the tab than Melinda's, or Ellen's or Lynnette's. It is an ironic, rueful laugh echoing down out of a dark heaven as I watch myself pick Melinda up and carry her to the back seat of the Impala.

On the way to the hospital I wonder just how far down on the list of phone calls I was. Never mind. I'm the one.

In the waiting room I call Allan with a borrowed dime. "How much money you got? . . . No, I'm serious!  ...Well, take my guitar down there and hock it, ... yeah, the amp too."

The doctor comes in. An old, tired guy. He and the nurse stand there, both with that you-little-son-of-a-bitch look. "She's a very sick young lady. You waited an awful long time to get her here!"

He is into his "young man you ought to be shot" lecture, filled with his own frustration. He must see a lot of these, I guess. The lecture sounds rehearsed. Some look in my eyes makes him stop somewhere between marriage, abstinence and condoms, and there is a silence while the nurse shuffles the chart papers beside him.

I think about explaining that I touched her down there but never fucked her. I was just her first real boyfriend .... But I don't.

He might even have believed me when I told him she was in Hawaii for the last year, and, "She just flew here yesterday to get it done."

They don't even ask me if I know who the bastard was that botched the abortion. Could have been somebody they know ....

Al brings the money while I sit outside Melinda's room. He found his way quickly, without any hassle. He was like that in those days. He gave me a big wad of cash without a word and sat next to me smoking Winstons until I let him off the hook. There was all his paycheck, all my guitar and amp, and some more. He didn't even need the word I said to his back as he headed for the elevator. "Thanks."

She is pale and almost always asleep, the big glass bottle dripping stuff into her arm. In my dream, I live on cigarettes and coffee for those three days and remember to call my mom and tell her where I am. In my memory, I think I just wanted to.

Now, waking up, I remember how the bill was so much money that I couldn't  ... somebody in her family was finally called and, despite her dad's angry threats, somebody somewhere paid it off. I gave most of Al's money to her anyway.

As she lay there recovering, I really did ask her to marry me and fuck up both our lives; but there was this part of a plane ticket left and she had an aunt in Boston. Whatever didn't work out between us the first time was still there for her to still make it "not be possible."

"If the baby had been yours, it would have been so different."  I think Sandra Dee said that, too. And she smiled like Melinda did then. And she almost meant it when she said, "I still love you." 

That was supposed to be a reward.

Over early morning coffee now.  I think about those times. How I never, ever get involved in discussions about abortion. And about those fanatics that want to bring back those days; want to make sure Melinda's daughters pay the same kind of penalty for the sin of illicit sex. God knows nobody should escape that justice! 

I wonder in my head ... do they really want to have it done with coat hangers again? Is that part of the grand design?  

No. What human would wish that upon another? 

My mind almost wants to give them the benefit of their ignorance. But, wincing through a cloud of cigarette smoke, I discover instead that I believe all those fanatics should, in the fullness of time, rot in hell.