Where's Arkie? (Anne Stuart)

So I don't pretend to be any other age than I am. I'm a baby boomer, a child of the turbulent 60s, a survivor and thriver of the most turbulent time America has gone through. It was in the sixties that I made my first nun's habit -- it was made from an old black choir robe and a turtleneck. The second, believe it or not, was made from my best friend's Belgian linen curtains. By that time (mid 60s) I would have read Gone With the Wind, but since it was the 60s I have no idea where it had inspired me to rape my friend's interior decor.

If it sounds like I spent the 60s mired in drugs you'd be wrong. Oh, I experimented. Very few young people with intelligent, inquiring minds didn't. But I seem gloriously free from any addictive streak. I smoked, and unlike Bill I inhaled the marijuana, not the nicotine (for some reason I never did figure out how to inhale a cigarette). I drank. I took diet pills, prescribed and not. I danced barefoot in Central Park in a low cut Madame Pompadour dress and ended up with a hell of a sunburn. I stayed up all night at the Fillmore East listening to the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, staggering out into the dawn of the lower east side to face another day. I got arrested and tear-gassed protesting the war, I got a tattoo when nice girls didn't get tattoos. Most of all I lived for music.

I did barely make it through high school. My family went belly-up my senior year, with my father hospitalized for alcoholism and prescription pill addiction. He went through convulsions (literally the DTs,) and ended up eventually living with friends of friends, slowly recovering. Needless to say my mother wasn't doing well either after having lived with my father for twenty-five years or so, and she ended up unavailable. So I spent the first half of my senior year skipping school, until the family got together and sent me up to Amherst to live with my aunt and finish high school there.

Apart from that, I spent most of my life in the school system in Princeton, and I had a friend named Arkie, starting in third grade.

I'm not sure why I always felt bonded with Arkie. Maybe because he and I were the two fat kids in class. We had the same foreign lady paper dolls, and it seems to me there was something else we had in common, though now I can't remember. All I know was that Arkie was always there.

We weren't particularly close friends. We both had nasty tongues, even back then, and he used his on me in the seventh grade on a number of occasions (he once told me I was giving out candy because my sister was so pretty and I wasn't -- which led me to going off in a corner and having adolescent hysterics and raking my fingernails down my face. He did express concern that maybe he shouldn't have said that, but Arkie had the kind of mouth I had -- shoot first and think later).

We went to high school together, mainly spending time in the AP English courses. We both came from literary families, though his was more distinguished. His father was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, my father was a newspaper editor among his many jobs that eventually dissolved due to his drinking. We both wrote well. We had the best teacher in the world, one of those teachers you remember forty years later for the affect he had on you. Our teacher was Bill Cook, a young teacher who ended up head of his department at Dartmouth, and early in his teaching career he managed to fire everyone up and fill them with devotion.

By that time Arkie was Art. He was also skinny, while I was still fat. But I still felt a connection with him.

Not any kind of lust -- I kept that for musicians and movie stars, the lone exception being the seventeen-year-old John Lithgow who was president of the Student Council. Arkie was still Arkie, no matter what he called himself.

I'm not quite sure what happened to him after I was carted off, but when I came back rumors abounded. He'd gotten into Harvard, but the demons of the 1960s were riding him hard, and he was going to end up dead in a gutter if he wasn't careful.

The last time I saw him he was too skinny, too brittle, too messed up, and I wondered whether he'd make it through. That was forty years ago, and I thought of him every now and then, wondering if he'd survived.

Turns out people wondered the same thing about me. I'd left school at the end of my junior year in a dramatic suicide attempt. (Snotty female classmate: she was just doing it for attention. Krissie: well, duh.) Then, mid senior year I simply disappeared, and when it came time for our class 35th reuinion people discovered me, astonished that I was still alive.

Every now and then I thought of Arkie and I'd check the internet. There was someone with his same name who worked to the public schools in Boston, which seemed a reasonable job for him if he'd survived. When his famous father died I read the obituaries to see if Arkie was one of his survivors, and I breathed a sigh of relief to discover that indeed he was. He'd made it.

I don't know what reminded me last night, but I googled him again, hoping for an email address or even a snail mail one, but no luck. However, I did discover that the Boston Arkie was indeed my Arkie, and he'd quit work and written an amazing book, with the kind of reviews (in the NYT and PW) that would make a strong man weep. He was still an amazing writer, and he hadn't lost that. I just sat there grinning.

Oh, he'd sneer at my work, no doubt. He probably hasn't changed that much -- he always was a sharp-tongued little son of a bitch. And that's okay -- I'm secure enough in what I do that I don't mind if he would think it was trash. Sometimes otherwise brilliant people aren't evolved enough to recognize grace and beauty where they don't expect it.

But the utterly cool thing is that Arkie made it, with a good life, a good career helping people, a brilliant book. And I made it, with a good life, writing books that I love. I'm the person that I would have wanted to be when I grew up (albeit fatter), and it looks to me like Arkie is too.

So here's Arkie's book: http://www.amazon.com/Boogaloo-Quintessence-American-Popular-Music/dp/0472030876/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224506274&sr=8-4

If you love American music, as I do, you'd love it.

In the meantime, here's to you, Arkie. I'm glad we both made it through.

I guess it's common enough to want to connect to people from our past. Hell, I know what happened to John Lithgow (clearly I had good taste back then) and half the people I remember from school. Who do you want to find? An old boyfriend? A childhood pal?

I hope you have more luck than I did getting in touch with them. Though you know, in the end, maybe knowing Art wrote a brilliant book and has had a good life is enough.