There is a song I first came across as an early 20-something, in the heyday of the freak-folk craze, as I was first acquainting myself with psychedelia. I downloaded (illegally!) albums from acts like The Incredible String Band, early T. Rex, and other sundry psychedelic songs from the 1960’s. One song especially stood out, a song that hit me hard and I returned to again and again as if it were a worn book on a shelf. I listened to it again today after coming across an old picture, after yet another return to his profile.
“Come and all your fair and tender girls that flourish in your prime
Beware beware keep you garden fair, let no man style your thyme”
The silly and charming herb wordplay aside, the song ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ by Pentangle hit me hard the first time I heard it for reasons I couldn’t quite sort out. It still feels like a dagger in the chest.
Today I looked up the man who I met when I was seventeen. For years I have been doing this occasionally. Visiting his official website, looking up his Myspace page, now his Facebook page. What is it I am trying to find there? I feel odd whenever I look. It feels like a furtive glance. I feel vaguely gross. It is a throng of confusing feelings.
Even now I clearly still see the whole thing as a personal failing on my part. But it all still feels vaguely thrilling. It also reminds me of a time in my life when I was on the cusp of dizzying freedom, and not long after before I was lost for decades to a kind low-key madness. I feel sorrow for a time and a place, but I also loathe myself for falling under his sway. In a way it was a portent of future trouble.
The picture I came across today was of him in 2000, right around the first time I met him. I was still in high school. The place was 12th grade English class, led by a teacher who I felt at the time was inadequate for the job. This man first came into our class as a guest lecturer. He led a local hub of literature and poetry. He just oozed coolness. He had hung out with beat poetry legends, some living, most now dead as of this writing. I didn’t have a crush on him, but I definitely wanted to be around him and his world of poetry and adultness and nightlife and my own potential for greatness.
I was a burgeoning writer that many previous teachers had seen potential in. I had been encouraged by many to hone my craft. It was natural then for me to pursue him a source of honing my craft further. I don’t remember the first time I talked to this man, but it must have been shortly after he brought one of the biggest names in the NYC avant beat scene to our rinky-dink suburban high school as a guest lecturer. I must have come up to him afterwards, basking in the coolness, trying to ingratiate myself. I must have earnestly declared my love for the guest lecturer’s poetry.
Shortly after graduating high school, I attended a youth writing workshop based out of his poetry center. It was around this time he started inviting me to stay after the classes. I had an inkling of where this was going and I was thrilled. I buzzed with a mixture of being invited into his orbit and the promise of possible sexual experience (of which I had little) but also disbelief — I wasn’t a particularly pretty girl, so back then I wasn’t sure someone would actually really like me like that.
Eventually the after class hang outs and coaching sessions turned into an invite to come to his nearby apartment. He made a fancy dinner for us both one night. We sat at the small table in his tiny living room crammed with books. It was a studio apartment, so his bed was in the same space as the spartan dinner table.
He was on the bed and I was at the table. I must have known what was coming. But I didn’t know what I was feeling. Was it dread, excitement, uncertainty. It was all of those things. He invited me over. I was laying there next to him, and I remember feeling deeply uncertain. It was perhaps a sense of obligation. I wasn’t sure how I felt about his hands on the back of one of my ill-fitting 1970’s t-shirts that I fancied wearing at the time.
After more tentative patting and hugging, I told him I should probably go. I left, but he had me now entirely enfolded. I must have felt powerless to him. I don’t remember feeling giddy or smitten or anything I would later experience with later lovers.
I was a deeply insecure teenage girl. I kind of hated myself and I definitely hated the way I looked. But still, I had the inner glee for life and creative pursuits that I haven’t given up on since despite all my mental struggles. I wrote and read and ingested culture voraciously — of course I wouldn’t say no to a man who was pals with Allen frickin’ Ginsberg. I was promised tutelage, but also attention. In return I offered a young body that I hardly understood.
In the photo from 2000, he is standing outside of the poetry center storefront. The street it was on is now demolished and early 2010’s boxy developments have taken the place of much of the former rundown downtown. The same downtown rife with bars filled with grizzled men. The same streets I haunted as a young woman. One of those nights I had seen a dead body on a gurney being wheeled out of one of those bars.
He still looks terribly cool. Shot from below, to appear imposing. He is the age I am now. I can’t sort out what it all means still. I can’t take back all of my hours of returning to his website, like I was visiting the scene of a crime. Which it wasn’t, I tell myself. I was legally of age. I was newly eighteen, but when I look a that picture of the cocky looking man in front of his very own poetry center, I feel sick. Then I feel a defiance. I am not her anymore. I put my headphones on, go outside and stroll confidently down the street. I listen to that Pentangle song again. All that I have lost to time.
