For the next month or so, True Stories Well Told will feature writers I have met through First Monday, First Person, my “salon” for memoir writers held at the Pinney Branch Library in Madison.

By Sarah White

In the spring of 1975, I was 18 and a student at Franklin College, a tiny Baptist school in central Indiana. It was Dale and Gabi from my circle of friends there who first suggested we should spend the summer in Indianapolis.

I had never seen love like that Gabi and Dale shared. They seemed to have one sole purpose–to delight each other. Whether it was reading aloud to each other from Richard Brautigan’s books, or shopping thrift stores for unusual gifts, every action said love. I proposed to my boyfriend David that we follow Dale and Gabi to Woodruff Place. With David I would mimic Dale and Gabi’s love as closely as I would mimic the life I imagined was Joni Mitchell’s.

I wanted to be Joni Mitchell. Or at least, get started on my romantic Joni Mitchell life. I needed to be with “Michael from Mountains,” who “goes where he will go to.” I wanted to live on “Sisotowbell Lane,” where “anywhere else now would seem very strange.” I was even up for a misadventure, a King in a tenement castle “who painted the pastel walls brown.” I didn’t care if I spent my summer happily in love or not. I wanted to find out what it feels like to feel.

David and I found the place that would be our love nest in an old mansion. Dale and Gabi found an apartment on the first floor of a classic turn-of-the-century apartment building nearby. Woodruff Place had been home to Indianapolis’s most affluent residents in the 1870s when it was first developed. But the city grew and a century passed. By the 1970s when we moved there, it was a neighborhood of run-down mansions divided into single rooms and small apartments occupied by spaced-out hippies and drunken old men.

Our furnished apartment overlooked the central intersection, facing the grandest of the ornamental fountains. But the fountain was dry and the cement cracked. What should have been ornamental flowerbeds were littered and brown. The house’s halls smelled of cigarettes and unrinsed booze bottles. But our summer sublet—four rooms if you count the tiny kitchen and narrow bathroom–was elegant.

I found a job within a day, being able to type 110 words per minute at 95% accuracy. The best of the city’s temp typist positions were mine for the taking. I picked an insurance company headquarters. Gabi got a typist job too. David and Dale signed up for day labor through Manpower.

The June days scrolled by effortlessly. We went to our jobs. In the long summer evenings, we smoked pot, and when we could find it, we dropped acid. Sober, stoned, or tripping, we made music, sitting in the defunct fountains where the cement walls made for great acoustics. The Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” was our best number, with Gabi wailing the lead on the violin and me noodling accompaniment on my alto recorder. The boys strummed their guitars and sang.  I could tell myself I was just like Joni Mitchell, living in Laurel Canyon with her boyfriend and her band.

My parents invented “don’t ask, don’t tell” that summer. I don’t know what David told his parents; I only know that his father agreed to continue paying the monthly bill from his gas card. We lived in a bubble of our own making, and some of it was fine and fun. But even as the paychecks started coming in from the temp agencies, we began to realize how short on funds we were. How had I not imagined that my Joni Mitchell life would bring expenses?

The sex didn’t cost anything, so we had plenty of it. Everything else that summer was cramped by our lack of cash. We explored anything that offered free admittance. On very rare occasions, we went to a coffeehouse that had opened nearby and drank fancy drinks, trying to pretend that Indianapolis was like the college communities we’d left behind. Never bars—we couldn’t afford the drink prices and besides, the drinking age was 21, and none of us were that old.

One evening, all of us gently tripping, we crawled out onto the porch roof in the twilight to watch fireflies. Suddenly we heard wailing and screaming coming from the direction of the fountain. A car gunned its engine and squealed away. At the fountain, a young woman was throwing herself into the empty well for all the world as if she intended to drown herself. “I love Wayne!” she cried, again and again, “I love Wayne!” We scrambled back inside and hurried downstairs to rescue her.

Gabi grabbed Wayne’s girlfriend in a big hug and we coaxed her upstairs, where we put ice on her bruises and passed her a joint. Then we proceeded to hear how her love for Wayne remained strong in spite of the beating he had given her before driving her to Woodruff Place and throwing her out of his car.

We wrapped her in beams of light. We turned on her the glowing flower of our acid-washed love for all mankind. Our connection felt deep and true. When she was ready to tell us the address of a friend, the boys drove her there.

She told us she worked at a coffee shop and promised to buy us all a drink the next time we came in. A few days later, we looked her up. At first, she ignored us. Then she admitted she recognized us, and muttered an insincere thank-you. But she did not offer free drinks or an iota of warmth. In our acid-tinged beatitude, we had mistaken the girl for a new friend; now she mistook us for the enemy, a reminder of a nightmare with Wayne she was probably trying to forget.

Only years later did I realize why she didn’t welcome us. And that was only one of many markers of how emotionally clueless I still was, the summer I was 18 and living in love on Woodruff Place.

Postscript. I am still in touch with Dale. I asked him what he recalled about the night of “I Love Wayne.” Dale remembered that from the girl’s ravings, he identified Wayne as a well-known Indianapolis low-life, president of the Outlaws motorcycle gang. He realized that for our safety, the sooner we could get her away from us, the better. About the visit to the coffeehouse, he said, “She may have called it that, but it was a biker bar. She was a waitress at the Cactus Lounge.” His memory agrees with mine on the discomfort of our one visit there. All this time I’d believed the girlfriend didn’t want to see us because she’d broken up with Wayne; more likely they were lovers again and we were the persona non grata in their clubhouse.

©2023 Sarah White