Free She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan Page A

cabbie pulled over and we embraced again and kissed, and she said,“I fell in love in London.” I gave the man £10 and said, “Take her to Elephant and Castle,” and then she put her hand on her side of the rain-streaked window, and I put my hand on top of hers on my side of the rain-streaked window, and then the cab pulled out into the night, and I stood there on the corner and watched the red taillights disappear into the fog.
    I didn’t feel like going home yet. I looked around at the dark buildings of London surrounding me. There was the Great Portland Street tube stop. A soft chime came from the bell tower of the church across the street, where earlier in the day Donna said she’d sat on the steps and eaten peanuts.
    In the months to come, Donna and I would write dozens of letters to each other. I kept hers in my pocket as I walked across Europe with my ridiculous backpack—through Spain, through France, through Italy and Germany, through Belgium and Holland and Scotland and Ireland. I would lose my virginity—barely—to her in my own teenage bedroom that summer, in the Coffin House. I would travel by Greyhound bus to visit her on the North Shore, where we drank wine and made out on the beach under a full moon. She would talk to me on the phone about her former and then occasional and then “other” boyfriend, Neal, about how Neal didn’t understand her, about how Neal didn’t believe in her, about how Neal’s favorite expression was “and shit,” to mean “et cetera,” as in,“I really love you, and shit.”
    In the fall I hitchhiked to Brown from Wesleyan, and there we broke up. I still had slept with her—barely—only the one time. I think Neal began to have a pretty good sense that I was no threat. Still, as Joyce wrote in “The Dead,” “I was great with her at that time.”
    In Providence, Donna showed me the grave of H. P. Lovecraft (with the epitaph I AM PROVIDENCE), and there she said, “I don’t think I want to be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore,” and I said okay. By then it was all the same to me. I’d already been imagining what I’d look like in her clothes. I left her apartment on a Sunday morning, and I never saw her again. I hitchhiked back to Connecticut and wrote her a poem as I lay in the back of someone’s pickup truck, something along the lines of
This is sad but don’t forget that night in
London, that was really cool.
    As the taillights of her taxi disappeared in the fog that night, I knew I wanted to hold on to the evening just a few moments longer. So I walked toward the church, and as I did, I wondered, had she just made all that up about being an hour and a quarter late this afternoon? Was she ever here at all?
    I sat on the steps of the church. It was three in the morning. I was surrounded by fog.
    On the steps at my feet were the shells of roasted peanuts.

Monkey Orphanage (Spring 1982)
    I found out about the monkey orphanage while I was doing a story for a magazine about the Skunk Club. Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn’t quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy. Whenever I needed a quote, I’d just make one up and attribute it to an “anonymous source.” On one occasion, I alleged that something had been stated “according to someone that would know.”
    Fortunately,
American Bystander
magazine wasn’t too concerned with accuracy. Mostly we went for the yuks. The
Bystander,
which was run by former
National Lampoon
editor Brian McConnachie, lasted for a year or two in the early 1980s; it was funded and sustained by a ragtag group of former
Saturday Night Live
performers, some writers from the
Lampoon
and
Second City,
and a handful of cartoonists from
The New Yorker.
The goal was to be “an American
Punch”
or, as we put it then, “a hip New Yorker.” This was long