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Mark Schweickart
Janie -- As you know from reading my silly book The Hat Fluffers of Buckinham Palace, Bob McGivern, whom you asked about in your post, showed up in that. When I was a briefly a freshman at the University of St. Louis, he wandered into my dorm room one day after having driven (in his very cool ex-Checker Cab) to Idaho and back where he had gone, unsuccessfully, to convince an ex-girlfiend to come back with him to Ohio. He had heard that I was at St. Louis U. (Go Billikens! - what a stupid name), and the next thing you know he was living (for free and under the radar) sharing a dorm room with someone else in my hall, although he was not enrolled as a student. When my friend Tom (aka Rasputin) and I decided to drop out of school shortly thereafter and make a run from the long drafting arms of Uncle Sam by hitchhiking our way across the country in order to somehow eventually make it to England where our dream job of fluffing the hats for the Palace guards awaited (whew, that was a nice run-on sentence, and not over yet), It was Bob who drove us outside of St. Louis to begin our journey with out-stetched thumb .
The following year, found me back in Columbus, and now living in a dorm at OSU. Who should I run into again, at the Thirsty I? None other than Bob McGivern, who was sitting at a table with an 18 year old, pretty pistol of young lady, named Jennie, who would eventually become my first wife.
About ten years later, I ran into him again in Los Angeles, where he was a graduate student in Psychology at UCLA doing some sort of research on the brain structure of rats, or some such thing. When asked how this career shift occurred, he informed me that he had recently been named the "Young Scientist of the Year," by I don't know who, but he added that this was particulalry ironic since he had not been a science major in college, and further claimed that his last science class had been chemistry with Sr. Amy.
Unfortunately, I lost touch with him after that. I wonder where that career path led him. Perhaps someone else out there knows.
I have been encouraged to write a sequel to Hat Fluffers, which I actually did last year. However, I don't think I will publish this. The naiveté and humor and sort of Catcher in the Rye vibe of the first book gave way in the second book to Philip Roth-type adult sexual themes that I now feel may be a bit too personal to print. However, in it, I do have a description of how I met my first wife though Bob McGivern. It is written in the third person and goes like this:
Mark (or Marq, with a “q” as he sometimes liked to spell his name) was lying on his bed in his dorm room at Ohio State University puzzling over a letter, a letter that would become the first of a series of letters he was to receive over the next few weeks. It ended with:
Why is it that I can see through the window before the door can possibly open....
I feel so sick, so unnatural sometimes... I want to run and run and run... screaming why.... But I already know the pattern was made known a long time ago and I feel an obligation to follow through.
wish I could paint it clearer...just for you...but
“Something is happening here
and you don’t know what it is...
do you Mr. Jones.”
Marq, I love you and I miss you so.... I hope you know how much.
Thou hast committed
fornication: but that was in
another country, and besides,
the wench is dead.
The Jew of Malta
Dave came bringing more lovely books... so many things to do
“...Later on when soft Spring came
we flew magic kites and played on swings
we went broke on silly shopping sprees
sang bawdy songs and climbed through trees
in wet cement we wrote our names
and other wise and witty things.”
an excerpt from one of Dave’s poems
as is this:
... gentle breeze
protect my love
as you know
I must depart.
Shelter her
from trauma tortures
help to mend her
shattered heart....
I am alone now... you haven’t called... not that you will.... I just hope
It must bore you awfully to read these scribblings.... I am made up of innumerable parts... poets, musicians, authors, philosophers etc.
Marq, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.... I am so afraid.... Please help me feel safe or something.
So that was from Jennie. He was trying to break up with her. He had broken up with her, or thought he had. Hoped he had. Or had he? Did he really want to? Of course he did, but this letter didn’t help. It complicated his decision. How many girls had he ever met that talked like this, well, not “talked” really, but wrote like this, thought like this? “Sure,” he thought, “I don’t measure up to fantastic Dave with his constant gift of books and his original poetry hoping to ‘mend her shattered heart,’ but... but what? Let her go write her ‘wise and witty things in wet cement’ with him. Why is she acting as if I am the one she loves?”
Ah, but who was this one? She was a dark haired eighteen year old cutie, a busty high school senior with a slim five foot-two frame, “skinny legs and all,” as Tom Robbins would say. She had the combination of a thirteen year old’s freckle-faced innocence and an eighteen year old’s ripe sexuality bursting at the seams, and a tongue of wit and wisdom, and a few too many demons ready to spin her out of control. She was a force to be encountered. A force he had encountered. Yes, with this one there would always be others competing for her attention and affection. Not just poet Dave, but anyone passing near her bold orbit. And she had boldness in spades.
Consider how Mark and she had met. In Ohio in 1967, one could drink 3.2 beer at age eighteen, so there were bars everywhere catering to the younger crowd. One night at a campus hangout, The Thirsty I (as in, boy am I thirsty), Mark caught up with his friend Bob McGivern, who had also bailed on life in the St. Louis University dorms, and puttered back to Columbus in his trusty Checker Cab—the car he had used to take Mark and Rasputin to the edge of St. Louis the previous year when he dropped them off to begin their sojourn, hitch-hiking across the country. Bob was sitting with Jennie at a table when Mark approached. Small talk ensued, and after a short while Bob got up to put money in the juke box. She shouted to him, “Play Blue Rhondo a la Turk. You know, Brubeck.” Then turning to Mark, she said:
“He’s hopeless, you know. Clueless. The most unobservant guy I know.”
Mark asked, “Is he supposed to be observing something? Paying more attention to you, perhaps?”
“I’ll bet you a nickel that if I suddenly whipped my panties off, he would not even notice.”
She was wearing a mini-skirt, and before Mark could answer, she shoved a nickel towards him, leaned forward and up slightly in her chair, wriggled a bit doing something unobservable below the table, and then straightened up proffering her panties to Mark with a sly smile. As Bob returned, Mark quickly put the panties in his lap so Bob would not see them. Small talk re-ensued. After a minute or two, Mark drew from his pocket a nickel and slid it across the table to Jennie. “You win,” he said. Jennie then proceeded to explain the bet to Bob, letting loose with an oversized hoot of a laugh as Mark produced the panties as evidence. Of course, the bet made absolutely no sense. How could Bob have possibly been aware that the girl sitting next to him was now without panties? But of course Bob’s cluelessness had never been the point of Jennie’s bet. The point had been boldness. Boldness dripping with sexual provocation towards this new guy, Mark. How would he react? Intrigued? You bet. Who cares about the logic of a bet, when a sexy woman is handing you her panties? Virgin Mark was lassoed.
_________
Sorry if I have abused the forum here with my ramblings. I guess since I decided not to publish the sequel, I couldn't resist throwing a bit of it out there for someone to read, and apologize for shamelessly hoping to justify my ego-centrism by claiming it tangentially related to the query about whatever happened to Bob McGivern? Mea culpa. What can I say, it is tough being an unread writer.
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