Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Dancer
In the summer of 1966, when I was 17 & a recent high school graduate, I met Karen Battell, 16, entering her junior year, & a devoted dance student. For about two years from that time well into 1968 we were a couple. Her family witnessed it, my family witnessed it, our friends witnessed it, probably most teenagers in Roselle Park knew it. We reached the point when adolescent lovers break up or grow up, & we broke up. The circumstances of the split haven't mattered for a long time. Those are, I believe, the bare, indisputable facts. & that I was in love with her.
Everything else about her is a song. Every meaningful memory of her from that time is a song. I'm a child of doo wop; literally a child when it was in the air, mesmerized by its etherealness & absurd boppity bop ding a ding dong language of everlasting love. The idea that you could treat an adolescent romance with anger, sarcasm, mockery, as the Rolling Stones sometimes did, was new to rock when Karen I got together (we both liked Mick Jagger & The Stones). I knew it would never be my way.
Karen Silva died at age 62. She left a husband, a son, six younger siblings, at least one dozen nieces & nephews & hundreds of former dance students. With so many knowing & mourning her, Karen's life story is secure. All those too-few years were more important years than the two with me. But those two years so long ago are mine to tell, what I remember of them, & in my own way. Karen knew I was a writer, a poet. Let her other years be whatever they are, whatever anyone else makes of them.
In that summer of 1966 Karen began appearing at the periphery of my social crowd, a loose, coed, fairly diverse group that had been hanging together a couple of years. Some of us skateboarded. Mostly we talked about records, which bands were cool, which were not. We were starting to feel the Vietnam War & nascent counterculture pressing at the borders of our small town universe. I was nearing draft age & my brother was in the Army. I had hardly noticed Karen around town, for reasons that soon became clear. My previous girlfriend & senior prom date had been a vacuous, whiny, faithless blond cheerleader. It taught me a lesson & I had closed up. I had to be informed by friends Karen was trying to get to know me. Ever cautious, I made a few inquiries about her, some background information but mainly to find if she'd recently broken anyone's heart. What quickly came back was this: Nobody seemed to know much about her except she had grown up in town, was the oldest daughter in a very large Catholic family on Hemlock Street, & that she was really, really into ballet dancing. Take a good look at her.
Karen Battell was the most beautiful teenage girl I had ever seen. She has remained so to this day & will always be the most beautiful teenage girl I have ever known. Not an indisputable fact. Don't underestimate my ability to make a convincing case for it. Accept it as the eye of the beholder.
She had a regal nose & dark hair sometimes brushed out, sometimes pinned up in a dancer's bun. She was also smart, quick-witted, sarcastic, sweet, knew how to dress herself, & had poise & presence - words that wouldn't have occurred to me then - meaning a way of looking good just standing in one place. & she was really into ballet.
We lived 1,500 feet from each other. Half block, long block, short block, right turn, first house on the right. I can still walk it in my mind. So close. I know a family across the street. Where has this beautiful girl been hiding? It would have been like to me to look at her house, at night, before I picked up the phone. "Here's her number," someone handed me. It was in the phone book. I'd looked. Thanks, I'll take it from here.
I understood really being into something. I was really into writing & getting into music. I had friends really into playing guitar. My dad was really into American history. I didn't question their devotion or the time they gave to it or the dreams they had. Karen, just by observing me at a distance, had perhaps intuited I was something of a kindred spirit. It was good to be a teenage couple in that town. She wanted a boyfriend who wouldn't compete with her dancing, wouldn't question her dedication. That would be me. I wasn't handsome, I stuttered, I had anxiety attacks, I was an insomniac, I was shy. But I had a variety of friends, most of them a little nutty, I knew how to have fun. I had interests I didn't much share with my friends. I had the capacity - familiar to other poets - of seemingly doing nothing for hours on end.
That's all there it is to it, for a start. There is not much chronology or narrative. I didn't keep a journal. I went away from writing for awhile, to make music. It's possible I wrote a few poems for Karen, perhaps some letters. It's mostly anecdotal now. Some are anecdotes I've been telling for decades, on the radio, to friends, in my blog - impressions of her, her family. The way she looked in different surroundings, how she moved. How I felt being with her. Never saying her name. She was The Dancer. There are things about her I have never shared with others & never will. We were both private people who held back large parts of ourselves, a Scorpio & Capricorn. My nickname, Rix, was itself a kind of public mask. Privacy was a premium in both our homes. we valued it, & quiet moments. We were open with each other in ways we weren't with family & friends. But even then we had our closed places. She became a rudder & keel to my sail.
I don't look back at it as a failed relationship. I've long thought of it as a successful relationship, a remarkable adolescent pairing for its time & place, hardly connected to what came before or afterward. In a larger town we would have been invisible. Being a couple in our one square mile town was a public thing. In real life, people have love relationships that go on two or three or more years after they should end. Some of them turn into doomed marriages because it's the direction the current flows in many small towns & families. You get engaged halfway through college & from then on ride toward the wedding on the commitment itself & on expectations of others, blinding yourself to changes making the thing an increasingly poor gamble. Take away the natural adolescent disappointment that Karen & I weren't soulmates & the relationship provided me with just about everything I could have wanted from it.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Everything else about her is a song. Every meaningful memory of her from that time is a song. I'm a child of doo wop; literally a child when it was in the air, mesmerized by its etherealness & absurd boppity bop ding a ding dong language of everlasting love. The idea that you could treat an adolescent romance with anger, sarcasm, mockery, as the Rolling Stones sometimes did, was new to rock when Karen I got together (we both liked Mick Jagger & The Stones). I knew it would never be my way.
Karen Silva died at age 62. She left a husband, a son, six younger siblings, at least one dozen nieces & nephews & hundreds of former dance students. With so many knowing & mourning her, Karen's life story is secure. All those too-few years were more important years than the two with me. But those two years so long ago are mine to tell, what I remember of them, & in my own way. Karen knew I was a writer, a poet. Let her other years be whatever they are, whatever anyone else makes of them.
In that summer of 1966 Karen began appearing at the periphery of my social crowd, a loose, coed, fairly diverse group that had been hanging together a couple of years. Some of us skateboarded. Mostly we talked about records, which bands were cool, which were not. We were starting to feel the Vietnam War & nascent counterculture pressing at the borders of our small town universe. I was nearing draft age & my brother was in the Army. I had hardly noticed Karen around town, for reasons that soon became clear. My previous girlfriend & senior prom date had been a vacuous, whiny, faithless blond cheerleader. It taught me a lesson & I had closed up. I had to be informed by friends Karen was trying to get to know me. Ever cautious, I made a few inquiries about her, some background information but mainly to find if she'd recently broken anyone's heart. What quickly came back was this: Nobody seemed to know much about her except she had grown up in town, was the oldest daughter in a very large Catholic family on Hemlock Street, & that she was really, really into ballet dancing. Take a good look at her.
Karen Battell was the most beautiful teenage girl I had ever seen. She has remained so to this day & will always be the most beautiful teenage girl I have ever known. Not an indisputable fact. Don't underestimate my ability to make a convincing case for it. Accept it as the eye of the beholder.
She had a regal nose & dark hair sometimes brushed out, sometimes pinned up in a dancer's bun. She was also smart, quick-witted, sarcastic, sweet, knew how to dress herself, & had poise & presence - words that wouldn't have occurred to me then - meaning a way of looking good just standing in one place. & she was really into ballet.
We lived 1,500 feet from each other. Half block, long block, short block, right turn, first house on the right. I can still walk it in my mind. So close. I know a family across the street. Where has this beautiful girl been hiding? It would have been like to me to look at her house, at night, before I picked up the phone. "Here's her number," someone handed me. It was in the phone book. I'd looked. Thanks, I'll take it from here.
I understood really being into something. I was really into writing & getting into music. I had friends really into playing guitar. My dad was really into American history. I didn't question their devotion or the time they gave to it or the dreams they had. Karen, just by observing me at a distance, had perhaps intuited I was something of a kindred spirit. It was good to be a teenage couple in that town. She wanted a boyfriend who wouldn't compete with her dancing, wouldn't question her dedication. That would be me. I wasn't handsome, I stuttered, I had anxiety attacks, I was an insomniac, I was shy. But I had a variety of friends, most of them a little nutty, I knew how to have fun. I had interests I didn't much share with my friends. I had the capacity - familiar to other poets - of seemingly doing nothing for hours on end.
That's all there it is to it, for a start. There is not much chronology or narrative. I didn't keep a journal. I went away from writing for awhile, to make music. It's possible I wrote a few poems for Karen, perhaps some letters. It's mostly anecdotal now. Some are anecdotes I've been telling for decades, on the radio, to friends, in my blog - impressions of her, her family. The way she looked in different surroundings, how she moved. How I felt being with her. Never saying her name. She was The Dancer. There are things about her I have never shared with others & never will. We were both private people who held back large parts of ourselves, a Scorpio & Capricorn. My nickname, Rix, was itself a kind of public mask. Privacy was a premium in both our homes. we valued it, & quiet moments. We were open with each other in ways we weren't with family & friends. But even then we had our closed places. She became a rudder & keel to my sail.
I don't look back at it as a failed relationship. I've long thought of it as a successful relationship, a remarkable adolescent pairing for its time & place, hardly connected to what came before or afterward. In a larger town we would have been invisible. Being a couple in our one square mile town was a public thing. In real life, people have love relationships that go on two or three or more years after they should end. Some of them turn into doomed marriages because it's the direction the current flows in many small towns & families. You get engaged halfway through college & from then on ride toward the wedding on the commitment itself & on expectations of others, blinding yourself to changes making the thing an increasingly poor gamble. Take away the natural adolescent disappointment that Karen & I weren't soulmates & the relationship provided me with just about everything I could have wanted from it.
Labels: growing up, Karen Battell, love
