by Robin Green
Yes, we did. Or I did, anyway. Ronnie didn’t like private-school boys like them; she thought they were stuck-up and shallow. Her boyfriend then was Al Taubman, a cop’s son (probably one of the only Jewish cops on the force at the time), tall and fair-haired and madly in love with her. I’d be at a sleepover at Ronnie’s house and crouch by the living-room window watching them make out in Al’s father’s dowdy Chevy sedan, waiting for her to come inside so I could press her for details about what they’d done.
“He was just touching me down there,” she said. “It was so sweet and then, I dunno, I turned my head and…” She shrugged and looked away into the mid-distance and shook her head.
I had no boyfriend, really. I went out with Tommy Mackinnon a few times, a redheaded jock in my class at Classical High, and Albert Shiffman, a thin-lipped pharmacist’s son who I sensed would be my destiny unless I got out of town, but nobody’d ever touched me, not with the tenderness Ronnie described. In truth, no one had touched me there at all. I could make myself come—I’d been masturbating since I was four. At least, that’s my first recollection because of the trauma involved: my grandparents walked in while I was in the middle of it, lying on my back on the carpet of their upstairs flat, ostensibly watching TV with my brother who sat cross-legged, engrossed in whatever was on, and I couldn’t stop, even with the embarrassment of my grandmother and grandfather standing there laughing at me. What a spectacle I must have been, my technique involving as it did a great stiffening of limbs and strenuous rubbing. A far cry from Ronnie’s sweet orgasm—something that I wouldn’t experience for a long time.
But now here was David Leach and I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about his great car, his wild reputation, and as if on cue, here he was lighting what I knew was a joint (though I’d never seen one), taking a quick sip of smoke, holding it in, and then, with the dreamy expression I’d see so many hundreds of times in the years to come, tilting his head back to let the smoke escape from his lips. Peter passed the joint to David after he’d had a toke and then David shifted in his seat and, with the joint discreetly cupped in his palm, held it out to us.
Ronnie shook her head—she could go so unexpectedly prudish—but I saw it as a challenge and I saw my future in it if I accepted. I knew who David was by reputation. His friends referred to him as Party Chairman on those occasions when some of us were at Peter Winslow’s house late at night after someone’s party or after the movies making sautéed-mushroom sandwiches. The guys would all be watching the door, hoping the Chairman would show up.
Which I saw him do once just after I’d left Peter’s to walk the three blocks so I could be home by midnight curfew. David didn’t have a curfew. He didn’t have much supervision. He was the product of a second marriage, born to a father in his fifties and the pretty young Portuguese girl who’d waited on him in a department store downtown and had converted to Judaism so he’d marry her. They lived in what seemed to me a kind of exile in Lincoln, a far suburb of Providence where no Jews anybody seemed to know lived.
I’d seen David Leach before when I was a little girl at the Conservative Jewish synagogue we belonged to for a minute before we joined the swanker Reform one near our new house. Half Portuguese, half Russian Jew, with his curly hair, smiley crescent eyes, and plush lips, he didn’t look like anybody else, not then and not that night as he got out of the flashy red car and, with another boy and a six-pack of beer, headed up the walk to Peter’s house.
I knew somehow that David Leach was my ticket into the big world and I made it my business to go after him, somehow knowing too that I could have him if I did. I did the unthinkable for a girl in those days—I called him. His mother answered. She asked who I was, then yelled to David somewhere in the house that I was on the phone. He answered, “Hello?” I said hi. Then, after a short moment, he said, “Ma, hang up the phone.” There came a soft click on the line to tell us she had done as he’d asked.
David was cool. His Moses Brown prep-school friends were cool. Through him, they opened musical worlds to me. Joel Zoss, barefoot boy with guitar, played Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy in the local coffeehouse when we were kids, going on in life to open shows for B. B. King and Etta James and to perform and record with Taj Mahal, James Taylor, and Howlin’ Wolf. Rick Turner also played blues, then went on to build guitars for Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Lindsey Buckingham, and Ry Cooder, to name a few, and to help engineer the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound.” (Rick Femino would have turned out to be cool too, if he hadn’t wrapped his Morgan around a tree and perished at seventeen. But everybody has a classmate like that, right?)
A few weeks after my decidedly unladylike phone call, David took me to the Newport Jazz Festival, where we sat in the very first row, and the music continued in our time together in Chicago, where he took me to jazz clubs and we sat feet away from Charlies Mingus and Parker and, at home in David’s South Side Hyde Park apartment, played Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett vinyls on his top-of-the-line stereo. And, of course, rock—Cream, Traffic, Otis Redding…
In Berkeley, at our apartment in Fox Court, we dropped mescaline, got into the Firebird, and headed to San Rafael to see the Grateful Dead at the Euphoria Ballroom. We never got there. The mescaline came on as we were crossing the San Rafael Bridge and we realized we were getting way too far into euphoria already and headed home.
We saw Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Fillmore East in the winter of ’69 and that December saw the Rolling Stones at the Oakland Coliseum, where ten thousand people seemed then like a scary-big crowd. Even Bill Graham looked frightened as he patrolled the aisles, trying to keep us from rushing the stage. Or had I OD’d on pot brownies and imagined this?
We lived in Berkeley and missed Woodstock but we did make it four months later in December ’70 to Altamont, where, though we were unaware of the hit-and-run death, the LSD-induced drowning in an irrigation canal, the stolen cars, and the actual Hells Angels’ knifing and stomping murder of a man stage-side, we were more than aware of the prevailing bad vibes. They had begun even as we drove to the venue in heavy free-concert-going freeway traffic through the scorched, radioactive Livermore hills, parked in a broiling sea of cars, and tramped with the others through the hazy heat to the concert site, where we spread our blanket on what space remained on trampled brown grass high on a hillside, vying for room with decidedly un-peace-and-love hippies pushing and shoving and stepping on said blanket to claim their own patch of dirt with a view of the stage far below.
In David Leach fashion, we were late, had missed Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Jefferson Airplane, but Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young were playing, filling the late-afternoon air with their music, or they would have been if they hadn’t been drowned out by the war-zone sound of arriving helicopters bearing the Rolling Stones. It was announced that the Grateful Dead would not be going on—we’d learn later they were concerned about security for the vulnerably low stage—and the crowd, already restless and bellicose, grew even more so waiting for the Stones, who, we’d also learn later, were, with questionable logic, themselves waiting for dusk with the thought that darkness would calm everyone down.
But then a wave of sound as three hundred thousand people cheered and whooped when they saw Mick and Keith and Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman—the Stones at their height—finally come onstage. They took up their instruments, and a bare-chested, caped Jagger strutted and shouted, “All roit! All roit!” into the mic. They launched into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and it sounded great, even over what David said was a shitty sound system, though from where we sat Jagger himself appeared so minuscule that, stoned as I now was on purported Acapulco Gold, I decided to go down to the stage for a closer look. Others had the same idea but I did get close—close enough to see a stark-naked fat man flailing around in the middle of the crowd in a crazy dance, close enough to see Hells Angels beating back a man who was trying
to mount the stage, close enough to see that Mick Jagger was, in fact, actually minuscule—and, as the band launched into “Carol,” I made my way back up to our dusty blanket. A few songs later, somewhere in the middle of the evil strains of “Sympathy for the Devil”—not exactly a song designed to bring calm—when the commotion around the stage caused the band to stop playing again and again, Mick begging everyone to be cool (“Be cool, people!”) before they took it from the top, David decided it would be good to beat the traffic, so we gathered our things and got out of there.
When I heard about the Hells Angels murder, I imagined the victim was the fat man, but it was, in fact, some meth-head with a gun.
In Providence when we first got together, David was an elusive boyfriend. If he would not accept discipline from his parents, he certainly didn’t want to hear anything like it from me. Anyway, I considered my father so denatured by my mother that David’s intransigence seemed manly. And, conversely, since my father had been a man about town, a regular boulevardier before he met my mother and she domesticated him, maybe deep down I thought that’s what I should try with David Leach.
In any case, yearning for someone was a new sensation. It felt like what I thought love must feel like, the thrilling if painful unpredictability of him and the helpless feeling when I couldn’t stand waiting another minute for him to phone or appear in front of my house, the sweet sensation of giving in to an urge I shouldn’t, borrowing the family car to buzz his hangouts, cruising in and around places I thought he might be just to know where he was, just to get a glimpse of his red Impala.
He moved according to his own rhythms, would not be hurried. Me, I could be ready to go and out the door in minutes, but David could take hours just to get out of his own house for the day, even when he wasn’t stoned. He wanted to be sure that he’d have everything he’d need—who knows when he’d make it back home? It was basically the same stuff he’d always need—sunglasses, contact case, cleanser and eye drops, a spare set of the contacts themselves, pot, rolling paper, a tin of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and lighter. The pipe and camera paraphernalia would come while he was away in college and would slow things down even more.
Sidebar: I once watched him give my mother an empty Balkan Sobranie tin after he’d smoked all the cigarettes, telling her maybe she’d want to keep bobby pins in it or something. When he was out of earshot, my mother leaned in and mouthed, Watch out for him, he’s cheap.
He didn’t seem cheap. I felt like we lived large, driving around with the top down, me sitting hard by his side on the bench seat cars had then, the Party Chairman’s moll. Feeling like a moll wasn’t entirely fantasy. One of David’s close friends was Raymond Patriarca Jr., whose father, known as Big George—in the same way, I suppose, that the U.S. president is called POTUS—was boss of the entire New England Mafia.
Double-dating with Ray Jr. and his girlfriend (one of his girlfriends, anyway) Rosemary, we were treated like royalty at Middle Street Café, a pricey, clubby, hidden little downtown steak joint patronized by my parents and their friends, served cocktails though we were clearly underage. It was a scene out of Goodfellas, though that movie wouldn’t come out until 1990 and this was 1962, a full ten years before the first of The Godfather movies, eight before Mario Puzo’s book on which the films were based.
It was all so romantic, so picaresque. Ray Jr. had an XKE, a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the first Volkswagen bus anyone had ever seen. He went to Provincetown; he went to Miami Beach and came back with an illegal pet ocelot for Rosemary. And he had bodyguards—Zeke and Hillary, contemporaries of his who’d been to “college,” aka prison, and had been assigned by Big George to keep an eye on his son. The coffee table in Rosemary’s basement studio apartment had in fact been made by Zeke and Hillary in the prison wood shop.
Picaresque but also faintly dangerous, as when David and I drove Raymond up to Boston to deliver a message from his dad to someone in a nightclub in the Combat Zone. We pulled up and immediately a limo with tinted windows materialized behind us. Ray got out and got into it and the limo drove off. We waited. A big mook came out of the nightclub and stood there watching us. But soon, here was the limo again behind us. To our relief, Ray got out, nodded to the mook, got into David’s car, and we went home.
Not that Ray was then all that involved in the family business, though he would take over as boss after his father died in 1984 (peacefully and at home after a stretch in the pen for conspiracy to commit murder) until his own incarceration in 1992 for racketeering. But for now, he was only a bright young man in Brooks Brothers button-down shirts on his way to URI, the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, to study prelaw, just like Michael Corleone, except there was no Michael Corleone yet.
The Patriarcas lived in a modest house in an unassuming neighborhood off Hope Street not far from where we’d lived downstairs from my grandparents. Ray’s mother, a sharp-mouthed little woman, made Ray Sr. smoke his cigars outside in the backyard. You’d see him there, even in the rain, under an umbrella. Standing at the kitchen table wrapping Christmas presents for Ray Sr.’s crew, his wife cursed the task, cursed Christmas. And when, in that same kitchen, David’s Russian-immigrant father, Jonah, asked in all innocence, “So, what does your husband do?” Mrs. Patriarca looked incredulously at David and said, “What is he, kidding?” (Which with a Providence accent is pronounced “kitten.”)
All of the above about Raymond and more—like the times I’d stay at Rosemary’s apartment my first year at Pembroke and see her relationship with him more intimately—served as fodder for a racy and poignant short story about the two of them and also about Zeke and Hillary, Junior’s bodyguards, the story that put me on the map at Brown and, years and years later, informed my work as a writer and producer of The Sopranos.
It was during my first year on The Sopranos when we were in Down Neck filming an episode my husband and I had written, a flashback to Tony Soprano’s childhood in that Newark neighborhood, that I began to think about my Russian grandfather who had begun his American journey in Down Neck and remember snippets of stories I’d heard about him, that he’d worked in a butcher shop there, that he’d been married, that maybe he’d shot someone—his wife? And that he’d had to come up to Providence to start his life again, and here the stories I’d heard became concrete: how my mother’s family had lived for a time in the coastal town of Wickford, Rhode Island, where under cover of night he and his crew would unload barrels of illegal booze off boats from Canada, how at home they’d all siphon the liquor into bottles with Gordon’s Gin labels they’d glued on, how they’d moved thirteen times in my mother’s childhood, and the story of how on his delivery rounds in Providence her father would use her as a beard so he’d seem like a man out for an innocent Sunday ride with his little girl—a scenario we used in The Sopranos—and how my mother waited in the car for him, sweat pouring off her, knowing she and her father were doing something wrong and frightened to her core they’d be caught and put in jail. I began to realize that Grandpa had been a gangster—not on the level of Raymond Junior and his father, certainly, but a tough-Jew-with-a-gun-to-defend-his-turf rumrunner during Prohibition. A photograph I had of him now made sense—the double-breasted suit, the cigarette dangling from his lips, the thuggish gaze—and with that realization came a deeper understanding of my mother’s disdain of him.
I graduated from high school in January 1963—January classes being a temporary measure to accommodate the enormous postwar influx of Baby Boomers—and, to save money for college in the fall, I spent six months working at the greeting-card factory my father now repped for, punching in at eight, half-hour lunch and two ten-minute coffee breaks, punching out at five. The hands on the clock seemed barely to move. Time slowed to a crawl. To make it go faster I filled orders at demon speed, so fast that the owner, who was our next-door neighbor on Wayland Avenue, came onto the floor to cite me as an example of how fast the work could be done. It was then I realized, in no small part because of the way my
coworkers looked at me and rolled their eyes at each other, what an asshole I was, because I knew then what they already knew, that there would always be orders, incessant and endless, so what was the rush?
I was miserable at work and bored and lonely at home. My brother had gone to college and left a void in the house, and David Leach was also away at college. I took to my room, drawing self-portraits of my miserable self, until one day I stopped sketching for some reason and wrote my first short story right there on the drawing paper on the drawing board about a man with no legs escaping to Florida.
I’d all but lost track of Ronnie. I was now at the college-prep public school and she was at Hope High, a peg or two down the academic ladder. I heard that she had broken up with Al, that she hated school. I heard that she was drinking a lot and driving her mother’s Nash Rambler station wagon with her left leg hanging out the window. And that at someone’s house down the beach she dived drunk into a swimming pool that was only half full and broke her nose.
Things had already begun to go bad for her. The year before, we had started hanging out with boys at the Rhode Island School of Design. I learned to drive that year, the year my father had come home with a white, two-door 1960 Cadillac (last year’s model, a real steal), a Jew-boat, as we young people so adorably called it. My mother, embarrassed by the nouveau riche Jewiness of the car, with its bulbous body and sleek, sharp fins, said he should get a license plate that said IRA and pull the thing around on a string.
I loved the car, partly to spite my mother, but mostly because I felt so competent handling something so big so deftly. I loved to act the ironic limo driver, ferrying the RISD boys around in the back seat. I knew Ronnie loved one of the boys, but I didn’t know exactly what happened between them, learned only later that when he refused to return her physical affection, confessing to her he might be gay, she slit her wrists in the upstairs bathroom of her house, wrote his name all over the walls in blood, and left a trail of it for her parents to follow, out of the house, down Taber Avenue, and up Doyle, planning to find the boy and die in his arms. It was her first trip to a mental institution, this time to the newly opened psycho ward at Butler Hospital on Blackstone Boulevard next to Swan Point Cemetery, where we used to sneak cigarettes and where her ashes now sit.
