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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.\u00a0 Tanya walked around clutching Bay City Roller albums and had sewn plaid onto the bottom hems of her flooded semi-bell bottom pants.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Tanya was also skilled at meeting other teenaged autograph hunters, and they would plot their strategy to recognize and corner a famous person.\u00a0 Her plans, of course, always worked.<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Once the day was done, I went home with a baseball and autographs from every player on the New York Mets.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, there was an awkward moment when I found myself sitting on a player\u2019s lap, which seemed to make Peter quite frustrated, but I try to forget that particular incident.\u00a0 It seemed so innocent at the time.<\/p>\n
I should make it clear that I was never a Mets fan.\u00a0 However, I clearly admired Tanya\u2019s 12-year-old methodology.<\/p>\n
Tanya also had a few scatterbrained ideas, her most famous being the innocent \u201cpen pal\u201d scheme.\u00a0 I was already a pen pal veteran, having signed up with the \u201cBig Blue Marble\u201d when I was 9.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A new pen pal, even one from the United States, seemed a nice way to fill a boring summer.<\/p>\n
I really do not remember how it happened, but Tanya\u2019s idea of a pen pal was Ray, an inmate at an Idaho penitentiary.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Perfect for a 14-year-old girl who was too frightened not to write back, especially after watching \u201cSweet Hostage\u201d, a TV movie that starred Martin Sheen as a maniacal escaped prisoner who takes Linda Blair as his hostage\/eventual overnight girlfriend.\u00a0 After exchanging a series of letters, I found my pen pal making romantic overtures through poetry in which I was compared to a \u201ctoke of Colombian\u201d.<\/p>\n
At some point, Bertha became sympathetic to my plight and began to communicate with Ray.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Ray caught on to us at some point and stopped writing.\u00a0 In retrospect, he meant well and only wanted to form some sort of connection with the outside world.\u00a0 From within my own cloistered Catholic world of fear, I could never move past the whole armed robber thing.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
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