On a late-spring night half-a-century back, best as I recall, I drove a Plymouth through a restaurant napkin and entered another universe.

Of the first I’m reasonably sure; second, certain.

It was a time of infinite possibility, near-probability, life all full ahead, fears masked in male bravado, if there at all, and as the black rotary phone in my bedroom shot unanswered rings at Phil’s place, it was like I could hug the future. And expect it to hug me back.

1970, 18-edging-toward-19, was the last year I’d live with my folks in their West Oak Lane, Philadelphia home, which has housed most dreams since, regardless of my sleep-world’s time-period and denizens.

On the wall of that room—little larger than a closet—I’d scribbled a pathway to freedom by penciling a few memorable lines from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, celebrating the “mad ones” who want everything, simultaneously. A few feet from Jack’s quote rested, uneasily, that well-thumbed paperback and a few others in the first rung of a small metal book-case: Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me; J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; William Goldman’s The Temple of Gold; Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus; Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.

My collection of tomes weighed like stones in a David-model slingshot aimed at something—or, in my mind, someone—blocking me from independent adulthood.

As it was my nature to view most everything I did as part of an endless soul search, these were my “find-yourself-already” novels, destined to forge an interstate to urgent destinations—wisdom, career, loss of virginity. Not in that order.

My call to Phil’s pealed madly, and I lapsed into one of many imaginary arguments with this long-time friend—my designated Goliath—who I loved dearly for all the great moments we’d shared, the summer in Europe we were about to blaze, and resented, because most of those times were his, me tagging along, laughing at his jokes, playing his outrageous what-me-worry sidekick shadow.

Why can’t you ever listen, Phil? Must you always pole-vault over whatever I say and make it your story? If I manage a good grade, you get a better one, and if I gain ground with a girl, you make more with a prettier one…or so you claim. How come I can’t slash your Saran Wrap-like prison around me? Will eight weeks across the ocean yielding to your stifling, if fascinating, aura leave me unable to burst unshackled and genuine, into my 20s?

My door rocked open, pulverizing my navel-gazing, and Phil burst inside, Art Carney into Jackie Gleason’s apartment, all 5-feet, 8-inches (one up on me, of course), Wrangler jacket, jeans, sneakers, on which he whirled, then stretched his scrawny (less so than mine) arms (hairier), pressed his hands on my books, squeezed volumes together in accordion fashion and elevated them towards the ceiling like a cascading deck of cards until they fanned out and detonated. Farina careening into my (mono) record-player. Kerouac sliding along the third-baseline of my hard floor. Hesse crashing against the “mad ones” quote. Goldman, Salinger, slithering under the bed. Roth splat! against the window.

Phil forced his stubbly face almost into mine and invoked my childhood nickname, along with the mission squirming in my scattered paperbacks.

“Change your life, Stutz!”

I gathered the books—fat chance he’d pick them up—and restored them to their vaunted spots.

“Where the fuck you been? I call, no answer, then suddenly you emerge, some amok Wizard of Oz flying monkey. How?”

“My sister dropped me off, man.” He cast a judgmental eye at my Kerouac wall. “Can you get the Bozo-mobile? Chance-of-a-lifetime sizzling at Continental Pizza.”

Woolworths at Cedarbrook Mall, just outside my home town of Philadelphia, didn’t look like much, but that was beside the point.

Back in the Sixties, it was a great place for teenagers like me to visit during trips to the mall, especially the variety store’s record cut-out bin. Filled with carelessly tossed-in crap, near-crap, and the occasional gem, at 33 cents for a 45-rpm single, a buck for an LP, it invited those long on musical thirst and short on cash to find keys to their universe.

One afternoon in 1968, I found one of mine, a rare version of Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled 1966 debut LP. Overflowing with clever, hook-filled songs, minus the one tune most people ever heard by the band, it starred three hyper-talented guys who went on to bigger things than cut-out bins: Richie Furay, who fronted the influential country-rockers, Poco (the cartoonist behind Pogo wouldn’t let them use the name), along with Steve Stills and Neil Young. They went on to be, well, Steve Stills and Neil Young.

And while it was Young who penned two of the LP’s most memorable numbers—an ode to alienation with the confusing title of “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” and a tune about a guy who loses his girl because he smokes pot, appropriately called “Flying on the Ground is Wrong“—Stills wrote and sang “For What It’s Worth.” That was an enduring protest song, capital P and S, which sold well as a single, and which the record company added to later pressings of the LP. My cut-rate beauty was a first edition that languished in the store after the change was made.

That move made sense for the company, and certainly for Stills, but I didn’t know or care much about it at the time. For a buck, I got the LP, which I played to death for months, long before I learned that, as a collector’s item, it was worth more because it lacked “For What It’s Worth.”

And when I finally realized what I had and announced it to classmates at lunch at Temple University, my way-too-loud voice carried to an adjacent table and caught the ear of an attractive blonde named Gretchen, who ambled over, introduced herself, and confronted me with two offers she thought I couldn’t refuse.

“Buffalo Springfield without ‘For What It’s Worth‘? I gotta have it. Bring it in tomorrow, and if you’re telling the truth, fifty bucks.” (Righteous bread in ’68.)

Trouble was, she was standing, I was sitting, and try though my eyes did to reach her face, they lingered on the rest of her, too. (Shit, I was 17.) I think she noticed, because when I turned her down, she upped the ante.

“OK, OK. How about this… you bring in the record, and I’ll sleep with you.”

She didn’t actually say “sleep with”—something far coarser—but you get the idea. Except I was a bashful virgin at the time and really didn’t get the idea; I muttered “nah,” perplexing the guys at the table and sending Gretchen back to hers. She looked wonderful walking away.

“What is wrong with you, man?” lamented several of my fellow long-hairs. “Ah, come on,” I sputtered. “She would’ve taken the album and left me hanging. I don’t even know her.”

That changed, eventually, though it took seven years, by which time I was neither bashful nor a virgin, and, so I thought, no longer intimidated by forceful, free-thinking blondes.

One May Sunday night in 1975, I was leaving my parents’ West Oak Lane house, on the way to my Baby-Boomer-issued VW bug, which would lead me to my Germantown apartment, when Gretchen appeared in the gloaming, walking a large dog.

I feigned car-key fumbling until they reached my parking spot, then offered a hearty “Remember me?”

“You didn’t want my money and you didn’t want my body. You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t quite ready for all that then.” Her dog—-she called him Dandy—put his front paws on my cut-off bare knees. “I wouldn’t have been much in the sack.”

She flashed a wicked smile. “Probably still aren’t.”

I wasn’t sure where to go with that, so I let Dandy step up to the plate. I took his front paws in my hands, looked deeply into his eyes in the fading light of dusk, and warbled the opening line of, you guessed it, “For What It’s Worth.”

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear

“You still can’t look me in the eye, can you, Stuart? That’s the name, right?”

I admitted as much, spewing out, kind of all at once, that after graduation I became a newspaper reporter, had a live-in girlfriend for a few years, no more, and I still had the LP, in a frame on my wall, no less.

“Well, I don’t want the album anymore, and I don’t care about your love life, in case you’re brandishing your single-hood as some kind of treasure I’m supposed to mine. Not interested.”

Except she was: By the time Dandy made it clear he’d had enough of our chitter-chatter, she’d scribbled her phone number on my right wrist with a Bic.

(continued on page 2)

Nineteen fifty-nine was a year of great uncertainty. What about the Russians? Why so many TV Westerns? But in Stuart Nation, Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane neighborhood, I tripped over my own vexing questions like they were too-long shoelaces—all swirling around a girl in my fourth-grade class whose disinterest intoxicated me.

I was a happily-chatty kid most of the time, except when I was around Carol, whose studied cool and blond, bowler-cut hair usually left me incapable of saying more than hello. To the actual Carol, that is; I shared some incredible phantom-afternoon interludes with the imaginary one at home after obsessing over the real deal all day at F.S. Edmonds Elementary School.

Borderline prodigy psycho? Maybe—but this isn’t your story, it’s mine. So here goes.

Our day-dream dates would begin with me opening a Charles Chips potato-chips can and yanking out two salty scoops, one destined for my spot at the dining-room table, the second for my father’s hallowed nesting-place.

“These sandwiches will look weird,” I’d address dad’s setting, now hers, “but wait ‘til you taste them!” I’d toast two Freihofer’s bread slices and set them aside; the last two would be Carol’s. I wouldn’t mind my toast a little bit cold—she wouldn’t get the full genius of this without Total Heat.

After the second toasting, I’d theatrically grab the hot slices and put them onto a red plate (“Hope you don’t mind plastic”) and reach for the peanut butter.

I’d glob the brown oily mess onto all four slices, bring them to the table, and crumble the chips, first Carol’s, then mine, onto one slice per plate, then smoosh our sandwiches together.

“You are gonna love this!” (At this point I envisioned her blue eyes dancing.) I laid my sandwich onto a blue plate and went to the fridge for Coke, breaking, then dropping, ice into two plastic tumblers and beaming toward her setting.

“This will wash it down just right”  I’d return to the table, gobble both sandwiches and down our drinks. Then I’d clear the table, plop down at my spot and look at hers, where I pictured her grateful smile straightening my crookedest grin.

“This is important,” my buddy Walter bellowed one lunchtime across the chatter and clatter of Germantown High School’s vast cafeteria. “And I can only say it once.”

 The topic that day in 1965 was color—specifically, orange, the hue of a stack of cheese crackers piled high and majestic near the cash register.

I’d questioned the wisdom of paying for food we each had access to at home, albeit connected to peanut butter in the form of Lantz snacks. Why buy them when we have them in our kitchens?

“These crackers,” the tall, handsome 10^th grader said in stentorian tones that always impressed me, even when marshalled for nonsense, “offer a moment that may never be ours again. By the time you get home, even if the crispy morsels are as wondrous as these, and even if you can wedge them off the distracting influence of peanut butter, you may not be open to their beauty the way you are now.”

He waved his muscular arms wide and drove home his point.

“Something may steal your full attention—your screaming sisters, homework, whether to obsess about Sandy Miller’s legs when you celebrate yourself tonight. The opportunity may well be gone—and woe be to you if it passes.”

Overwhelmed by Walter’s deep-voiced, deep visions, more smitten than ever by the orange-tinted stack, I bought a quarter’s worth, which I shared with the orator—his intent, I suspected, all along—on the way back to our table, where I countered his eloquence with a digression about Dick Allen, the slugging, outspoken Phillies star who divided opinion among Philadelphians, heavily broken down by color, or, in the case of white baseball fans, racial attitudes.

To young people, black or white, especially white, as counter-cultural feelings started to mount in the ‘60s, the strong-willed black third-baseman represented the future, when anti-authoritarian heroes would have their day.

To older people, he was a troublemaker, and to older whites, especially, a guy who should know his place and be grateful to earn big money playing a kid’s game.

“My dad and I, May 29, I will never forget it, Walter…”

“Never forget something that happened a few months ago, Stuart?”

“Don’t ruin my story. Dick slammed a homer over the Coke sign on top of the bleachers, 529 feet, and it left the park in a flash…whoosh…gone. Everyone was quiet for a second, it happened so fast, flick of his wrists, boom, and then…”

“Everyone went nuts. I’ve heard this before, Stuart. Save the dramatics for the Cliveden Clipper.”

“Don’t’ make fun of the school paper, Walter. Writing’s the only skill I have. Haven’t got Allen’s wrists.”

“Or his color, man.” Walter pointed to his own skin, on his forearm. “You can’t ever know what that’s about.”

“True.” I finished my crackers, minus the few he snagged. “I can’t. Though you can’t know what it’s like to Jewish.”