Bertha, the craziest friend from my childhood, once introduced me to Tanya, the only child of a very wealthy lawyer couple that had an apartment in a Pacific Heights skyrise and a home in Atherton. Tanya walked around clutching Bay City Roller albums and had sewn plaid onto the bottom hems of her flooded semi-bell bottom pants. She was the first autograph chaser of my acquaintance, and her quiet demeanor hid a rather crafty streak that plotted out times, dates and ways to meet her favorite teeny-bopper idol. Tanya was also skilled at meeting other teenaged autograph hunters, and they would plot their strategy to recognize and corner a famous person. Her plans, of course, always worked.
One afternoon, she brought Bertha and I to the Hilton Hotel where we met Peter, a kid from the North Bay who memorized every player on the New York Mets by staring at their baseball card photo. After feeling very stupid hanging out in a hotel lobby and trying desperately not to appear like a desperate fan, Tanya and Peter cut through my defenses with some very matter-of-fact maneuvers that had us speeding around with efficiency and accuracy.
Once the day was done, I went home with a baseball and autographs from every player on the New York Mets. Of course, there was an awkward moment when I found myself sitting on a player’s lap, which seemed to make Peter quite frustrated, but I try to forget that particular incident. It seemed so innocent at the time.
I should make it clear that I was never a Mets fan. However, I clearly admired Tanya’s 12-year-old methodology.
Tanya also had a few scatterbrained ideas, her most famous being the innocent “pen pal” scheme. I was already a pen pal veteran, having signed up with the “Big Blue Marble” when I was 9. By the time I was 14, I had a really sweet pen pal in Germany who always sent me photos and souvenirs from her vacations around Europe. A new pen pal, even one from the United States, seemed a nice way to fill a boring summer.
I really do not remember how it happened, but Tanya’s idea of a pen pal was Ray, an inmate at an Idaho penitentiary. I could hear the invisible nun in my head scream as I skipped through misspellings to find that my pen pal was in prison for armed robbery. Perfect for a 14-year-old girl who was too frightened not to write back, especially after watching “Sweet Hostage”, a TV movie that starred Martin Sheen as a maniacal escaped prisoner who takes Linda Blair as his hostage/eventual overnight girlfriend. After exchanging a series of letters, I found my pen pal making romantic overtures through poetry in which I was compared to a “toke of Colombian”.
At some point, Bertha became sympathetic to my plight and began to communicate with Ray. However, she had a better way of insuring that their letters remained simple and friend-only: Bertha told him that she was 12-years-old and pregnant. Taking a step in confidence from Bertha, we both began to write outrageous letters outlining our circumstances: multiple pregnancies, jealous gangster boyfriends, poverty and the urgent need to find a husband with plenty of money to support our need for new stickers, Japanese erasers and handbags.
Ray caught on to us at some point and stopped writing. In retrospect, he meant well and only wanted to form some sort of connection with the outside world. From within my own cloistered Catholic world of fear, I could never move past the whole armed robber thing. Maybe I was never meant to at the age of 14, but I would be lying if Ray did not give me food for thought as I grew older and became more aware of the need to be kinder to people.
As for Bertha, my dear childhood cohort and fellow troublemaker, here is a reminder of our youth: a poem from Ray to Bertha that I found in a box of letters that my husband found in the garage:
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