The highway department tore down Carrie’s bridge last week. It had never been much to look at, just a humped-back, form-follows-function, two-lane iron relic from the age of smoke-breathing behemoths howling four-note woo-woo-wooooooo-woo warnings as they roared through the night. Built of rust-resistant wrought iron, patinated black by coal smoke and age, the homely span had conveyed buggies both horsed and horseless for nearly a century over the twin tracks of first the Pennsylvania Railroad, then Conrail, and finally the eastern branch of the Southern Pacific. But when a routine inspection disclosed extensive damage, it was quickly condemned, dismantled, and sold for scrap before any historical (”hysterical,” the company bigwigs sneered) preservation groups could object.
Carrie wasn’t there to mourn its demise. A blast from a madman’s shotgun five years earlier had “spared” her that unsettling sight. For two days, I watched from in front of her former home as the span was cut into pieces and trucked away. Had I not exhausted my reservoir of tears upon the occasion of Carrie’s death, I should have wept again. Country singer George Strait observed in song that “good memories don’t die so easy,” and I’ll be damned if I can see any reason to hurry along the process, not when time will destroy them at its leisure. So, about all we can do is hang on to our hats to the end of our ride.
The ride that brought me to Carrie’s bridge began in late April of 1965, a month and change before I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. I had just broken up with my first girlfriend in March, when we realized that we shared nothing in common except an adolescent fervor for sappy poetry. For me, that juvenile obsession had gradually evolved into an equally passionate love of folk music, and my fantasies became populated with visions of longhaired, willowy Joan Baez and Judy Collins lookalikes warbling Elizabethan love songs around the waterless fountain in Washington Square Park. After subscribing to Sing Out!, I learned to (badly) play guitar, all the while dreaming of the day that I would flee uptight, unhip Pennsylvania and migrate to Greenwich Village, where I could join the Sunday afternoon hootenannies and ogle through my shades the sexy beatnik chicks in black berets and miniskirts.
My rural high school was a good fifteen miles from my home, and every weekday morning and afternoon, I endured a half-hour bus ride to and fro, passing each way over the as-yet-unnamed railroad bridge that marked the midpoint of the trip.
One day, a classmate invited me to join his weekly penny ante poker game. Not much of a gambler, I was about to decline his offer, when he mentioned that there was a genuine ten-foot pool table in his basement, and I quickly changed my mind.
“Sure,” I replied. “As long as we can shoot a little eight-ball first. What time should I come?”
“Around seven, and bring plenty of change.”
The boy lived a half-mile from the school, and as I was crossing the bridge the next poker night, a roll apiece of pennies and nickels in my pocket, I beheld a living personification of my folk queen fantasies sitting upon a support beam, casually stroking her long blonde hair and smoking a cigarette. Stunned by the unexpected vision, I slowed my car, our eyes met, and in that fleeting exchange, my heart was pierced on the wing by a coup de foudre arrow. Suddenly, the Greenwich Village of my imagination – the fanciful realm in which every day is but another stanza in a four-beats-to-the-measure paean to all things romantic, aesthetic, and hip – was magically transported to my humble neck of creation, and as I watched her receding figure in my rearview mirror, I knew that I was about to embark on Frost’s “road less travelled.”
As we were shooting pool before the poker game, I asked if anyone had ever noticed the mysterious girl, knew who she was. No one had, nor knew her name, and I dropped the subject, as well as two bucks betting on inside straights and busted flushes. At school the next day, I asked a boy who lived near the bridge if he knew the girl’s identity, and he laughed.
Yeah, he knew her, and why did I want to know? Hadn’t I noticed her acne-scarred kisser, or gotten a load of her hawk-like beak? “My God!” he added with wry amusement, “don’t tell me that you’ve got the hots for ‘Carrie the Bridge Troll’?”
Blushing, I replied that I had just noticed her on the way to the poker game. “I was just curious, that’s all. What the hell, can’t a man ask a simple goddamned question without undergoing the third degree?”
Chuckling at my discomfiture, he provided her name – Carrie Levar – dismissing her as a wannabe beatnik whose blonde hair probably came from a bottle. “Hell, all the other girls put her down, make fun of her Cleopatra eye makeup. Christ, man, her face looks like it caught on fire and was put out with an icepick,” he said, with an irritating wise-guy, know-it-all sneer. “But, if you’re that hopped up, I’ll ask my sister to fix you up with her.”
“Goddamn it!” I thundered. “I’m sorry I brought it up. Forget I even asked, OK? I couldn’t care less about this chick Carrie.”
However, he knew better, and the following morning at the bus stop, he teased Carrie about her secret admirer, whose identity she managed to pry from him before the bus even got to school. Whereupon, she made like Nancy Drew, learned which classes I took, and arranged her between-classes routes to intersect with mine. Suddenly, senior me began to encounter sophomore she several times a day, passing close enough to see the faint blemishes on her face that I later learned had been caused by a severe case of measles, not acne.
But her schemes proved fruitless: The combination of my innate shyness and the fear of my classmates’ disapproval kept me from introducing myself, and I continued to cowardly breeze past her as though she were invisible, leaving her hurt and confused.
However, my false indifference didn’t stop me from driving past her bridge, hoping naively that she would spare me from the embarrassment of rejection by flagging me down to ask me for a date. If only that would occur, I assured myself, then I could ignore any social repercussions, because our mutual nonconformity would overwhelm the plebeian disfavor of the ”herd,” or so I fuzzily reasoned.
So, after inventing excuses to borrow the family car, I continued to drive over the bridge at least twice a week; always, she was there. As the weather warmed up, I went by bare-chested in order to show off my gymnast physique in the deluded expectation that she might be suitably impressed.
This absurd charade went on until my graduation ended our ridiculous, one-sided folie à deux. I took a job at a local foundry, saved up my money, and in the summer of 1966 finally fled to Greenwich Village, only to discover that the Beat scene was kaput, folk music had morphed into folk-rock, and that all the luscious Folk Queens were consorted-up, although several of their ladies-in-waiting proved amenable to my awkward new-kid-in-town advances.
After a few months of bohemian rhapsody, I returned home long enough to dodge the draft and save up a nest egg sufficient to hatch out in March of 1967 a fourth-floor loft at the corner of Bleecker Street and the skid row Bowery.
Blessed with a 1950 Chevy sedan with which to explore Manhattan, I welcomed in with hipster panache the jolly spring of the upcoming “Summer of Love”. Amid a merry merry-go-round of willing hippie damsels, I nearly forgot my former muse, Miss Carrie of the Bridge. Nearly, as in not quite, my dear.
In late June, when the “Summer” began to sizzle, I decided to dog the fading tire tracks of Jack and Neal’s/(Sal and Dean’s) mythical Hudson that ”held the road like a prehistoric bird” to the green light at the end of the continent. California/Haight-Ashbury, here I come!
I returned home to hit up my friends and mother for extra gas money, all the while thinking of Carrie. With my earlier shyness eradicated by experience, emboldened by my ever-romantic guardian angel, I showed up at her front door, a dozen roses in hand. When she emerged, with a ”What the hell is this?” expression on her face, I offered her along with the bouquet an invitation to the faraway dance at Haight-Ashbury. For a moment, she seemed about to say yes, then with a look of regret said no. I had come too late. She was busy with her own life, doncha know. Besides, why the hell hadn’t I asked her out in high school, when she would’ve followed me anywhere, no questions asked, nor roses required?
What could I say? How could I admit that I was just too damn shy to even approach her, that I was a slave to my friends’ opinions, that I had been a damn fool? It was all too much to confess, so I simply said goodbye and drove away, on to Gomorrah-by-the-Bay, where two out of my three summer lovers would give me gonorrhea.
By October, thoroughly disillusioned by the hippie version of “freedom”, utterly disgusted by rampant drug use, I sold my ready-to-expire car for forty bucks and rode my thumb home to Pennsylvania, cured of my bohemian fantasies by a double dose of penicillin and harsh reality.
Self-appointed pundits, barroom philosophers, and dollar-a-word greeting card poets maintain that time “washes clean/heals all wounds/snatches from beneath our mattress the annoying peas of regret”, but these bromides presuppose that we want to forget. Which, in my case, wasn’t true. For although I became a relatively content husband, a four-time father, and the owner of a successful masonry business, I occasionally thought of Carrie, wondered what she had made of her life. Once, she had symbolized my overly romantic ideal of the life artistic and had been as much of an influence in her unaware fashion as the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the writings of Henry Miller, and the music of Bob Dylan. Had she never assumed her daily after-school vigil, I may never have worked up the nerve to pack two changes of clothes in a child’s suitcase, grab my Martin guitar, and hitchhike into town to catch the next train to New York City, where I walked from Grand Central Station forty blocks down Sixth Avenue to Sheridan Square to be welcomed to the Village by a dead-eyed Bleecker Street junkie panhandling up the bread for a fix. Unbeknownst to Carrie, she had been the “Flying Lady” on the hood of my Village-bound “Folk-rock ‘n’ Rolls Royce.”
The vexing fact that I was never seduced by a Joan Baez/Buffy Sainte-Marie/ Judy Collins clone was irrelevant: Although I hadn’t the fortune to wake up in the morning bed of a Chelsea folk princess, I had often strode in my genuine Pakistani water buffalo sandals (the footwear by choice of every with-it beatnik from North Beach to Tompkins Square Park) the very cobblestoned alleys immortalized in song by my dreamboat six-string sirens. And if the magic I envisioned eventually proved illusionary, at least I had the opportunity to fulfil a goodly part of my teenage fantasies before they withered and died.
The years and decades went by. My wife and I divorced, my parents died, and I lived mostly alone in the family homestead, servant to a promiscuous housecat, stepfather to her frequent litters. I worked, paid child support, and drank. Girlfriends came and went, my hair grew thin and gray, and on badly hungover mornings I sometimes heard the forlorn whistle of the “Old Age Express” grinding ever-closer down the tracks.
One summer afternoon, a brick mason friend took me to his favorite drinking hole, the social quarters of a local fire company, one of the few bars that I had never visited. Midway through our first beer, the front door buzzed open, and in the back bar mirror I saw Carrie gliding across the room, still as graceful and svelte as I remembered, her long blonde hair untouched by gray. With a cry of surprise, I leapt from my stool and embraced her in the middle of the floor. As we hugged, both of us talking at once, I said the things I should have said long before, reminded her that we had a makeup date with destiny, asked her in a mad rush of words to ménage à trois with me and my cat.
She squeezed me back, gently rebuked me for my previous shyness, and then deflated my just-launched trial balloon: Sorry, but she already had a long-term boyfriend. Once again, I had missed my chance. We drank a few beers to the what-ifs, mulled over the might-ofs, and were just starting on the what-could-have-beens when my buddy said it was time to go.
At the door, I looked back. Carrie smiled goodbye, waved adieu, and once more I left her behind, my yearnings unfulfilled.
Over the ensuing years, I occasionally ran into Carrie and her boyfriend Steve at various bars. Fortunately, he was a friendly jack-of-all-trades sort, who never exhibited any jealousy over my ill-hidden fondness for his lover. I continued to play, for sexual stakes only, the dating game, and after Miss Kitten Machine was flattened by a dump truck, was adopted by a peripatetic tom cat, who had the grace not to bring home his offspring.
I saw Carrie for the last time at a friend’s picnic. Had I known of her presence, I would not have taken Anne, a stunning redhead whose drop-dead beauty might possibly be misconstrued by Carrie as an in-her-pockmarked-face reproach for her long-ago demurral to accompany me to Haight-Ashbury. Unfortunately, some hatchets resist burial, and old bones often demand resurrection.
Carrie’s sunglasses hid her eyes when I introduced her to Anne, but the set of her lips confirmed my worries. So for the rest of the afternoon, to Anne’s mounting displeasure, in a conscious effort to bolster Carrie’s self-image, I praised her as a former muse and inspiration.
Steve thought my beery deification amusing, but not so Anne, who considered me a poor gentleman for praising in front of her one of my old flames, even though neither of us had been more than singed. As the day became evening, and too many wine coolers threatened to loosen Anne’s inhibitions, I coaxed her into my car before she created a scene. Before I backed from the driveway, I looked for Carrie, but apparently she and Steve had quietly slipped away earlier, in effect, leaving me behind to wish that I had the nerve to follow her.
Within a year, Carrie would die, slaughtered with her older sister Sharon by a madman lodger at the motel where Carrie worked as a live-in manager, ambushed from behind, their heads shotgunned apart. After covering their bodies with a tarp, the crazed murderer fled to another motel, then shot himself to hell, taking with him the twisted “rationale” for his evil deed.
When Steve returned from the grocery store, he lifted the tarp, vomited on the floor, then called 911. The first officer at the scene did much the same. An hour later, the coroner, long inured by previous atrocities, merely cursed aloud the no good, son-of-a-bitch who had butchered the innocuous sisters.
I learned of the tragedy from a mutual friend who was so distraught that she could barely speak. When I heard the gory details, I wept myself, wondering what unspeakable crimes the sisters had committed in previous lives to deserve such a cruel resolution of their karmic accounts. I thought of how we poor humans pinball through our lives from one crisis to the next, amassing karmic points until just when it appears that we might finally prevail, an unforeseen jolt of fate tilts the playing field and our lights flicker out – Game Over! Then, resurrected by another “coin”, we are shot back into the playing field yet again, over and over and over, until…?
A final viewing was out of the question, and there was no funeral. An older brother arranged their cremation, promising to spread their ashes at an appropriate time and place.
But were it up to me, I would sprinkle a handful of Carrie’s ashes in Washington Square’s empty fountain, next to the concrete rim where the shades of lovers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sing in harmony with Joan’s sister Mimi Farina, Toms Paxton and Rush, Judy and Buffy and all the lissome, Rapunzel-haired folk goddesses of my teenage dreams who wrote and performed the folk anthems that prodded our nation’s moral compass to true north.
I would then scatter the rest from Carrie’s bridge onto a west-bound freight train barreling toward the setting sun that Carrie and I should have pursued all those many years ago when we were young and bold and hungry for adventure.
Today, I parked at Carrie’s old home and walked to the barricaded edge of the bridgeless gulf. Thirty feet below, the side-by-side pair of rails gleamed in the sun. Once they had been shaded by a bridge with its own guardian angel. Neither remained, although a new bridge, sans angel, was in the works.
Facing west, I offered a silent prayer for Carrie and Sharon and myself, imagining with sorrow the life that Carrie and I might have enjoyed had I only been less shy, all those many moons ago.
The whistle of an approaching east-bound train disturbed my reverie, and I returned to my car, and drove away for the final time, leaving Carrie behind.
The end.
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