The Bolero

It was 1964, at the height of the Beatles’ fame when I moved to Long Beach, California to live with four roommates in an apartment on Lakewood Boulevard.

Lakewood was a busy street near the McDonald-Douglas aircraft plant and a few steps from a bar called Little Abner’s.

Each night, for the first two weeks of living there, I could hear the drunks, who had just left Little Abner’s, stopping to pee against our apartment wall and sidewalk.

Our building had a name, of course, as did most southern California apartment buildings, and that name was, The Bolero.  To the five of us, this was hilarious since the name bespoke of romance and adventure, but it was simply a very ordinary, beige-stuccoed, typical southern California apartment building.

We played the Beatles’ music constantly, as well as some slow, sad jazzy stuff from Tony Bennett and Doris Day (yes, Doris Day). “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” always brought me to tears.  Still does.

We called our landlady “Log Legs”.  Now it seems like the cruelty of youth to have a laugh over her lack of ankles.  My grandma didn’t have ankles either.  Our landlady was very tolerant of the noisy girls that lived in the building she managed, for which fact we should have been more grateful.

I worked at Long Beach State in the typing pool.  Two of my roomies were nursing students, and two worked at a shoe dye manufacturing plant in yukky Downey.

On my 21^st birthday, I came home from work to see my roommates and the guys that lived next-door hanging out the window singing Happy Birthday to me.  That night the boys took me to Little Abner’s to have my first legal drink as a twenty-one year old.

I closed my eyes and imagined this was happening in New York – at my Brownstone.

My dearest and closest friend was Roberta.  She was the John Lennon of our lip-synching Beatles’ duo, and I was Paul. I was Paul because I looked a little like him, and I could move my head exactly like he did.

Roberta played the guitar/ironing board, and I played the guitar/broom.

Since Roberta had a loose schedule – she was going to Long Beach State AND working part-time at the shoe dye place – I would often lend her my car.  She would take me to work and pick me up — usually.

One day I waited on the curb on the edge of the campus for well over an hour after work hours.  By the time she got there, I was fuming.  I got in the car, but we didn’t speak on the drive home.

We walked up to the apartment, and when we got inside, Roberta went straight to the kitchen, pulled a butcher knife out of the drawer and handed it to me.

Of course, we broke into hysterical laughter, and it was over.

It seems she was leisurely swimming — more likely floating with a drink in her hand – in the pool with the guys from next-door when one of them said, “Hey, shouldn’t Jeanie be home from work by now?”

We partied with friends and especially the boys next-door almost every night – that is, until we got in trouble with Log Legs.  Stupidly, we had rented the apartment just above hers and her husband’s.

I was usually the first riser in the mornings.  I wanted some time to myself and the bathroom to myself.  The nurses worked the nightshift, so they didn’t get home until I was leaving, but I bumped into Roberta and Barbara if I didn’t get up at the crack of dawn.

I went to work tired almost every day because of our excessive partying, and most nights, I was right in there with them except for one particular night, I tried going to bed a bit earlier while everyone else was whooping it up in the living room.

I couldn’t take it any more, so I walked out to the living room, grabbed the guitar/broom and bumped the handle on the floor three times, loudly, knowing Log Legs would be slogging up the stairs at any moment anyway.  This would bring her up earlier.  I needed my beauty rest!

Boy, what power!  Everyone scattered to their own rooms and apartments.

Guess who was known as Designated Bitch (DB) from then on?

The guys next-door, that I keep mentioning, were from New Jersey. To us they might as well have been aliens from outer space.  It wasn’t only their speech patterns and mannerisms – they called a pan a pot (“Hey Girls!  Can we borrow a pot?”), the living room the pahlah, the record player the Victrola – it was their outlook on life.  They couldn’t have been more foreign than if they had been from another planet.

The skinny, red-haired, very white guy of the group — Eddie — fancied himself a lady’s man and very smooth with women.  Before going out, he would borrow Barbara’s eyebrow pencil to darken his very thin moustache and constantly talked about girls’ “breasts.”

I begged him to call them boobs, knockers, some other synonym, but apparently that’s what they called them in New Jersey. (Why does that botha’ you, Jeanie?”)  The clinical term was not popular in California at that time.

Once, I actually saw the one named Tanker biting his toenails at the kitchen table – their kitchen table; not ours.  Oh yeah, that was a real turn-on.

Eugene was probably the most appealing/normal (for New Jersey or California?? I don’t know.) one of the guys, at the same time being one of the hairiest men I’ve ever seen, for which fact I couldn’t fault him.

Those guys could cut a rug, though.  We never, ever used that term, by the way, but it seems appropriate here. That, along with their quick, east-coast wit was one of their greatest qualities.  Well, maybe not Tanker.

Of our group, Nurse Jani was probably the most naïve and innocent, but there was that night she fixed all of us cocktails – namely, Gimlets, a drink I have been unable to enjoy ever since.

Jani didn’t drink much, or maybe it was at all, but her mom was known for her partying when we were in high school.  All the popular kids went over there after school to party with her.  Not I.

Come to think of it, that’s probably why Jani didn’t drink, but she knew how to mix a good one.

After three or four gimlets, or was it six or seven, Roberta and I decided it was time to meet the rest of our neighbors living at the Bolero.

That long- ago Gimlet night, we went to every door and introduced ourselves and invited all the apartment dwellers to come our place “any time they felt like it.”

Nobody seemed too upset by our night maneuvers, but then how would we know?  They were probably scared to death.

Log Legs naturally paid us a visit the next day.  She was upset, but she never threatened eviction.  She did ask us to move — to the corner apartment where we wouldn’t be as disturbing to her and other tenants.

I left the Bolero, my roommates and the guys from New Jersey after six months.  I was going to Europe for an indeterminate amount of time, but I’ll never forget my time there.

I still keep in touch with some of my roommates – mostly Roberta until her passing in 2011 – but the Jersey Boys are gone with the wind.  I’d like to believe they went back to their own planet and talked about the strange females they met on earth at a place called The Bolero and who spoke of “pans, livingrooms, and record players.

The End.