Anyway, I thought the two of them were really cool, and they would stroll around the Village arm in arm, looking really great, very stylish, very pretty, both of them, and when you saw them you could cop some smack off of them and it was all very nice and pleasant and civilised, not like the other low-life junkie pushers I usually copped off of, who were just disgusting.
They lived in the Gramercy Park Hotel, facing Gramercy Park, of course, that exclusive key-entrance-only park in the 20s, and it always cracks me up to think that that fleabag hotel once full of junkies, tramps, and thieves is now multi-million-dollar condos, but I digress. Anyhow, although you could go up and cop from them at their hotel, I never did, I would almost always see them, as I recall, in a little hippie restaurant on Eighth Street, right at the top of MacDougal Street, that was down a couple of steps, that made the best deep-fried challah french toast in the whole wide world.
I always really enjoyed buying smack off of them because it was such a pleasure, what with the french toast and all, and their smack was always pretty good, too. I remember them strolling through the restaurant like royalty, everybody glad to see them, and they'd stop off at each table and visit and sell you some dope. I remember that that restaurant had little signs at each table that said, "Leisure is good food's best condiment, but please have the courtesy to extend that pleasure to others," meaning that they didn't want you hanging around clogging up the tables after you'd finished because they were always busy, with lots of people waiting outside to get in.
Anyhow, Jamie was a very pretty, kinda chunky, hippie girl with big hips, and I always had a huge crush on her and I could tell that she kinda liked me too, but she was always with her junkie boyfriend every time we met, so it was not to be, but whenever I saw her, I just melted and, I could tell by the twinkle in her eye that she thought I was kinda cute, too.
She had a daughter who didn't live with her, but I met her daughter one time on the street as Jamie and Bruce were making their rounds, selling smack to all the hippie kids and had her daughter tagging along with them. I guess she must have been about six years old or so, I'm not good with kids' ages, but she was kinda little, only came up to my knee, and I remember that I was really high, kinda wasted, when Jamie introduced me to her and I bent way over at the waist and shook the kid's hand and said something inane like "Nice to meet you" or something like that.
Some time later, and I honestly don't remember when, or how, it happened, Jamie must have left her junkie boyfriend and she and I did finally start dating. She lived in a little apartment on the Lower East Side, your typical hippie apartment, with a mattress on the floor and funky bits of furniture found on the street, as I recall, although I may be recalling a mash-up of the many such apartments I've been in over the years.
Anyway, we really liked each other a lot and I don't remember doing smack with her, but we must have, and I don't remember any specifics of making love with her, although I know that we did do that, a lot. What I do remember is that she introduced me to a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have known about otherwise, like, for example, the hippie/beatnik poetry readings at St. Mark's Church, because she was a poet herself, although I don't think I ever read a single bit of poetry of hers, because she never showed it to me and I, being a selfish narcissist, never asked.
I also remember that she introduced me to honey. Yes, that's right, before her I don't think I'd ever eaten honey, or, if I had, it hadn't impressed me, but she was really into honey, specialty and exotic honeys, and we always ate it on toasted english muffins. And yogurt, she introduced me to yogurt, too. I can't remember the brand name now, maybe it was "New Country" yogurt, but at the time, in the late-1960s there was some kind of brand-new healthy yogurt selling in all the hippie health food stores at the time, and we used to avidly go out to find it and eat it up, yum, yum.
I remember her laughing at me one time when I misspoke. I had gotten knocked down and kicked in the face by some pill head over on the west side, by Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street where all the gay guys who took downers hung out, and I was telling her about it and about how "It really got my dandruff up!" and she laughed and laughed and told me that it's not "dandruff" it's "dander."
And then, for some reason, I got bored and broke up with her. I think it was too intense. I remember her asking if we could still hang out and have sex even if we were broken up and I told her no because, well, that's all we ever did anyway, so, how can you break up and then continue to do what you were doing all along, that's not breaking up at all, really.
I really, really, liked that girl, she was special, but I was just a dumb-ass hippie teenager, and a junkie, to boot, so I just didn't appreciate her even a little bit. Of course, I think that maybe that's part of what attracted her to me, was the fact that I was just a guy who treated her like just a guy would, I guess. I often wonder what happened to her, and I often wonder if she's out there somewhere sometimes wondering what happened to me, too.
And that's the story of Jamie M-E.
