Free Spirit

Ilene in ‘69—family photo

I’m bad on names.  No doubt, it’s a moral failing, but I’m not the sort who remembers names as long as I should, though faces and stories stick around. Back in the early 90s, I may have been better; at least it took a few years for the fade away. Folks’ dogs I can remember–their names not so well. 

But this is now going on thirty years ago–and the heart of the story goes twenty years further still, so if I confuse the details, I’m hoping she’ll forgive me. Mine was an indifferently focused life until college, probably not too different from others at Clemson. For twenty-something year old boys, it’s surprising they don’t get lost on their way home for dinner, and it’s true sweet looking girls can confuse them.

I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Back in 1990 or so, mid-afternoon and bent over my drafting board, staring at a design problem–work of which I now have no idea–and the phone rang. One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy like a certain telephone operator would insinuate. If your first pop star crush was Justin Bieber, you may miss a few references in the story. 

“Bill Evans, can I help you?” 

“Bill?” 

Most days I’ve gone by Bill. In grade school, the nuns called me William, so they pretty much spoiled that one. And by then, William would give away the cold callers, marketeers and bill collectors, so I knew to say, “He’s out at the moment.”  Or ask Betsy, our long suffering admin to take a message. 

So, “Bill?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Did you go to Clemson?” 

Clemson? Holy bat shit, was the Pritzker Prize for Architecture calling? With a soft, southern accent?

“I bet you don’t remember me.” 

Flirtatious, warm and familiar–not at all baffling–it took no time at all to recognize her. 

“Ilene?” 

Then her rollicking full-of-joy laughter. 

Her warmth, her laugh and her eyes were what I remembered most from those days at Clemson. Here it was twenty years later, and how’d she remember me? Even better question, after all this time, how did she find me living two states north?  Not like I’d won the Pritzker Prize or nothing…

“Boy, you’re dumb. I looked you up in the Clemson alumni directory. We’re publishing the directory this year.” 

“We?” 

When we first met at Clemson in ‘69, she was a hippie girl fresh from high school. By 1990, she was a graphics designer at Jacobs Press, a small family press, commuting between Columbia and home, a round trip of two hours easy each way. 

Pickens was another Carolina town, less than an-hour’s driving time north of Clemson. 

We must have talked for an hour. Middle of the workday, but I was too amazed to care. I was pulling sixty-hour weeks building an architectural practice, so if my partners complained I could tell them to go stuff it. Ilene had always been so easy to talk to, and besides, we had twenty some years to catch up on. 

Southerners have a language and a style all their own. Ilene surely did–she still does. I had the need to talk, and we had the phone bills to prove it. Long distance charges still applied in the 90s. Languid phrase at a time, she’d unspool stories with a performer’s talent. If you’ve read Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club named for her father’s tall tale drinking club, you just need to picture a woman telling the story. If I ever meet Mary Karr, I’ll kiss her too. 

The country’s losing its regional ways of speech. Everyone wants to talk like TV newscasters and Vana White–who, BTW was born in Conway, a three hour drive from Pickens. At one time, there couldn’t be more different expressions and accents than between Maine and Georgia, unless you took an exit off I-85 and meandered two-lanes leading to places hardly known outside of South Carolina. You could sure hear some accents in those towns.

There’s a world’s difference even between Charleston on the coast and western Carolina. Charlestonians believe in their blue blood status, and the folks in western Carolina just laugh at them.

In the western parts of the state, Greenville-Spartanburg is the closest to a metropolitan area, but not so far away are the Blue Ridge Mountains, and soulful country. Scattered like a spiderweb of neurons are towns and villages like Pickens and Easley, Seneca, Six Mile and Liberty. Not so far away, Cashiers lies just north of the state line up in the Blue Ridge highlands. Whitewater Falls straddles the border. Oh, and it’s rumored Clemson students used to get stoned and go skinny dipping at midnight in Lake Keowee. That’s another story. 

I had to say, her phone call from the blue after twenty years seemed weirdly well timed. I did say. I was recently departed / still recovering from a long marriage to the woman I’d dated back in college, a mutual mistake my former spouse and I made, leaving our two sons holding on to a bare semblance of a home. Ilene knew my ex, not well. They may have even met once back then. I have this fleeting memory…

If Ilene had called six months earlier, we would have had a warm enough exchange, a long distance laugh with polite promises to stay in touch, etc… but at the time I was still enraptured by someone I hoped was as seriously involved as I was–even if she was too young. Mary had gotten me started writing poetry again, so it wasn’t a total waste. But by the time Ilene had found my phone number in the directory, I was just this broken mess trying to recover from a bad smash up following a failed marriage, missing living every day with my boys. I was living in a spartan apartment thirteen stories up and writing to ease my misery.  

As it was, I was single again, recovering from that traffic accident of an affair that had left me more mixed up than ever. Being wrenched one way to get free and the other way to be lost left me needing to babble. Poor woman, she listened. Her ex was a race car driver in his dreams, and that union had produced a child she was raising on her own, no child support, mentioned offhandedly like she’d not expected any different. How do you leave your child? It about broke me, and it still did, seeing how it broke them. 

It was telling, how much we had in common, following the same trails in different countries. 

In truth, Ilene had turned me down twenty years before. She hadn’t come right out and said it, but she figured I needed to take care of one girlfriend at a time, and how crazy was that? Back then, I would have jumped on that thing like a bad dog, but she refused to let me–and I’d just assumed she wasn’t too interested. Not so shocking, that.

Our first story began innocently enough–I still have two very sincere letters from her tucked away to prove it. We ran in the same circle of friends–hippies, pretenders, and a few hangers on. She asked if I would talk to another friend who was pressing to be more than just friends.He was into her way more than she was into him–metaphorically speaking we were all ‘into’ each other in the 60s. That’s cool.

One day she drew me aside and asked would I talk to him? She carefully explained his friendship was all she wanted, not all that other stuff, and would I give him a letter she’d written to let him down gently? Otherwise, she wasn’t sure she should keep coming over to Clemson. Right from the beginning, she trusted me enough to be let into her life. She had to know I was a sucker for cute women and how her being sweetly open affected me, try as I might to disguise it. 

So I did as she asked. 

It was clear Mike didn’t want to see it end, and I suppose that’s what her letter said. Under the circumstances, I felt a bit duplicitous counseling him when I was interested in her. I was as honest a broker to him as I wasn’t totally to her. She must have seen it–she was too smart not to have–my tail wagging was an obvious clue. At nineteen, I rationalized it satisfactorily to myself.  

She sent a letter thanking me, or somehow I got the word. We exchanged a few letters and stayed friends, only seeing each other when she’d infrequently drive down from Pickens. Since I was dating someone else long distance, I was safe. As long as I didn’t get all carried away, I could manage things. And it worked OK up until the road trip to Atlanta. 

Duane Allman in Piedmont Park ca ‘69—from The Great Speckled Bird archives

In the spring of ’69, Atlanta was hosting an antiwar protest in Piedmont Park–which was a gathering of the tribes as much as anything. Painted micro-vans were traveling from all over the South. Atlanta, being only two hours south of Clemson, was doable, and our band of antiwar kids were planning to go. One schoolmate (whose name is history) offered his parents house; he said they’d volunteered to shelter our gaggle Saturday overnight before the protest on Sunday–probably because they didn’t want their teenage son camping out in the city–I’ve come to learn parents have ulterior motives.

I don’t recall that I knew Ilene was coming, but soon as we connected, the weekend changed for me. 

Takeout pizza was possibly that night’s dinner. We were tucked into the downstairs family room somewhere in the Atlanta burbs. Cool evening in the 50s. Nice house in a nice, upper middle class, very white burb not so far from my sister’s in-laws. The boy’s folks welcomed our tribe bent on protesting Vietnam. Come morning we’d be going to a day of antiwar speeches and free music–the headliners a band from Macon that had been playing free concerts in the park–the Allman Brothers. 

But that night I fell in love with a hippy girl from Pickens.   

Probably others were engaged with us in the conversation to begin with, but as the evening wore on, it came down to just the two of us. We sat up nearly the night talking–all she wanted to do, and all I dare suggest. Besides, we enjoyed getting to know each other. 

Though I’d been born there, I didn’t consider myself southern–I was Irish Catholic like my mother, like my grandmother, all from Pennsylvania. I’d resisted being southern all my young life even down to the accent, and now I’d come on this child of the south with no confusion about who she was.  

How was it this southern girl sailed above it like she did, and how did we hold so much in common? That being alive meant being open to the world, not just to the ones who looked like us, that if music was important, family was more so? That she was so clear about the Vietnam War–and war in general–being wrong? In the middle of a state so conservative, so pro-military, where had this wild child come from? I think she told me it was how her mother had raised her–twenty years later she clearly saw it that way.

In her soft spoken way, she told me about herself and I reciprocated. Said she lived with her mother, sisters, and had a father who she didn’t want to discuss. She’d been raised in that small town, lived there all her life, and said she was ready to move on. Not for any reason other than wanting to see more of the country. She’d outgrown Pickens, that seemed evident. She was already working a job with no plans for college, which seemed like a wide gulf. How could she be smart as she was and didn’t mind skipping college? 

She was a hippy–and took some grief in Pickens for the way she dressed, the bell bottoms, serape, hair like a second cape. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, as the song goes. She wasn’t too interested in the drugs, couldn’t tell how about the sex, but yes for the rock ‘n roll. She was a free spirit. By comparison, I was playing at one. I fully intended to finish college and get a job so I’d have a future. Meeting someone coming from close to nothing, yet seeming uninterested in how she’d make her way in the world, that turned my head. Free spirit.  

My then-girlfriend, later-wife was an only child of decently well off parents, living on Swan Lake Drive, a way nicer part of Sumter. Far as that was concerned, she and I didn’t have as much in common as Ilene and I had. My father had started college but needed to quit to support his mother. Died at 47 and left his wife to support three children on a social worker’s salary. My mother hadn’t gone to college either, but she made every effort to see her children did. Compared to Ilene, I was no smarter, I knew, no more loving, and I could have been passing as a fellow traveler or an interloper in this hippie scene. Yet there I was–and so was she. 

Naïve as I was, even I knew you couldn’t fall in love with someone overnight, but the more we talked the more I kept wondering how she’d come to be talking with me, this child who was wiser than a lot of adults, and what she’d learned she gave back in her own words. 

I had a hateful flu that weekend and was eating aspirin to hold the fever at bay, yet when it got too warm inside, we headed into the backyard so the rest of our crew could sleep. I felt like death from the flu and was shivering from fever, though I had no desire to return to the house. The sky was growing light by the time we quit to grab a few hours sleep. If that ain’t love…

I recall walking upper Peachtree Street, where the head shops were in Atlanta –free enterprise at its finest.  Picked up a copy of the Great Speckled Bird along the way. I saw some rough characters on Peachtree mingling with the hippies–or the hippies were already changing. When I later read how Haight Asbury was corroding from heroin, I thought back on that time on Peachtree Street. 

But later that day when the Allman Brothers took the stage at Piedmont Park, I found a band I would follow for as long as they lasted–last time was at Watkins Glenn when they, The Grateful Dead and The Band played in the pouring rain to some 600,000 crazy-for-music folks. Two drummers, two guitarists.  Duane was this scrawny long hair who played the blues as black as anyone–and Gregg’s gravel vocals, the way he handled the keyboards… 

I’ll be dead twenty years before I forget all the times I watched Duane, his lit cigarette wedged between the tuning keys. He was lost to the world beyond his searing notes. First musician I ever knew was a genius. I bought The Allman Brothers Band first thing getting back to Clemson.  

One other weekend back then, Ilene and I got together on our own. She was off work, and I drove the VW bug with the engine torque of a lawnmower over to Pickens. Her mother’s house was a small clapboard cottage. Did we stay in the kitchen or hide in her bedroom? The kitchen probably, or I would remember her bedroom. She suggested driving to a favorite park, and why would I object? It was getting on toward evening when we arrived at an overlook on Glassy Mountain (which I’m now guessing). She said she enjoyed coming there for the peaceful view of the country spread out below. We were talking as usual, and I was glad no one was listening in. 

It was winter and the sun was going down. How do I know she drove us there? Mainly because there was no gear shift between the seats, and when I stroked her hair, then her back, she was to my left. Being drawn by affection from an early age, I didn’t see myself as bold, just needy. Orphans and those missing parents are the neediest you’ll ever meet. My need to be connected to her overcame any bashfulness. 

For a long while after, I wondered, had she encouraged me, what path might our lives have taken? I wouldn’t have continued seeing my girlfriend. If I was fickle back then, I didn’t mean to live a duplicitous life. Ilene didn’t exactly push me away as put me off. I had the distinct impression she wanted to keep a distance between us, like she was waiting on something or someone else. Again, not a surprise.

The handful of women whom I’ve loved, who’ve loved me, are wildly different personalities, and possibly that’s part of the need–to be connected. Though I’ll brag that they share a common gift of kindness—has to be some kind of reflective glory. For someone I spent so little time with, had that evening been the end of it, Ilene still would have stayed in my memory. 

Either way, after finishing Clemson, I’d probably have hung with Lewis in our basement hovel on North Clemson Avenue, moved to Atlanta to find an architectural job, still gone to Yale because you don’t turn down good fortune when it’s gifted. But possibly, I might have hung around Clemson, stayed local, stayed after her. 

Funny how life takes you over the rapids and you don’t understand what the currents are doing.

After school, I was still living in Clemson working for a local landscape architect and playing music with Lewis and Mike (a different Mike) in the evening. I heard from a mutual friend Ilene had moved to Greenville–not ten minutes from Pickens—and I couldn’t say who I’d heard it from. Poignant to hear news about someone I cared about and lost track of. It was my impression she’d moved on.  

I was still driving to Columbia to see my future wife still attending USC–we were engaged by then–and Harry Bryant would ride along to keep me company. 

I heard Ilene hitchhiked across the country with a friend, and was living in a house full of radicals that one time hid Daniel Berrigan when he was running from the FBI–Paul Simon’s ‘radical priest’ of Me and Julio fame. Heard she’d become interested in women, which made me sad because I wasn’t one. All secondhand stories. After awhile, it all faded into a part of my life that was gone. 

Twenty years later, driving south from Northern Virginia, I had eight hours to think about what it would be to see Ilene again. We’d been talking for weeks, always talking, sometimes at work, other times late into the evening. She had a young daughter and a niece she was raising, lived with one sister who struggled with depression and her mother who was still working hard shifts; Ilene’s marriage had blown up faster than mine. She had married a second time, though it hadn’t lasted.

She thought it was hysterical when I carefully asked, had she liked women once? And I was surprised to learn she was still hearing from Mike. Seemed he’d stayed local“I think he’s still in love with me. He writes poetry.” 

When she opened the hotel door, we hugged and, unlike twenty years before, this time we didn’t let go. Though we were both older, it didn’t seem she’d changed so much as she’d grown into herself. Life choices she’d made–she’d gone back for a degree–was raising her daughter and niece in a house of women–she was still this free spirit. She was on the same path she’d been on since she was young. What we had seen in each other all those years before was still there–that was the real surprise. 

We spent an X-rated hotel weekend that first visit.  For the record. 

On a second trip, I stayed at her house. Ranch style in a quiet part of town. Ilene’s niece at thirteen or fourteen was into black eyeliner and Madonna posters on the wall. Goth was fine, and she was a cute kid, but hadn’t Ilene introduced her to the Allman Brothers? A year younger, her own daughter was growing her blonde hair long as her mother’s, if with curls. She seemed to have Ilene’s easy going nature, easier than her cousin though shy around me. 

Ilene worried her niece wasn’t focused in school and showed symptoms of her mother’s depression. I talked about my ex-wife’s own struggles with that evil, though we hadn’t yet seen it in Ryan. Life is so fragile–and we both knew how easy it was to become lost on the way–so she worried about her niece and daughter the same. As it turned out, they both grew into strong women.

Though it was striking to see the parallels between Ilene’s path in life and my own mother’s, raising children with no spouse beside her.

I’d met Ilene’s mother in ’69 but only in passing–and besides, she wasn’t who I was interested in. Ilene’s mother smoked like she’d lived inside a chimney, which Ilene admitted was hard to live with. Was her grandmother there that weekend? Quite possibly. Deb, her sister was. There was a lot of lively conversation, excellent food and too short a weekend.  

A month or so later, Ilene did an impromptu weekend up to Washington, bringing the two girls in tow, and we did a tour of the monuments. Ryan and Sean were there as well. Photos help. 

The two of us met again in Chapel Hill, splitting the difference, and once we camped overnight in a park somewhere in North Carolina, waking at midnight to the shriek of an owl flying low through the trees. 

Same smile twenty years later—photo by William E. Evans, ©1990

By 1990, I was working hard on building an architectural career in the Washington region, my boys were in school there, Ilene’s daughter was freaking afraid her mother would move them to Washington, but this time it was me. Chicken shit? Maybe. Confused, without question.  Even being dense as wood, still I knew a sad irony when living it.

I wasn’t finished processing my divorce, nor getting over my girlfriend, the one I should have known was too young. I had gone from zero to a hundred miles an hour right into a wall. I did write a pile of anguished poetry out of it, and Ilene got it published. Fifty copies, one to her, a few to friends and a few years later I gifted one to D, who I was hanging out with. When all you can give someone is your babbling about someone who helped you writer about someone else?  Irony piled on irony. 

My revenge was the book’s cover photo–which had been taken by my ex girlfriend with her camera.

Ilene and I didn’t last—maybe a year–‘geographically undesirable’ as Mary liked to say–before she said she was blowing me off for being geologically undesirable. It had been that and the fact I had kids who weren’t hers, which was nothing I’d ever change  Love me, love my boys; she knew it was a package deal. The trouble was, I was still grieving over Mary when Ilene reentered my life; I’d been so long alone and finding Mary in the midst of my closest circle of running friends was like sneaking into heaven then being told I wasn’t welcome. 

My timing with Ilene was rotten. I knew it hurt her–I hurt her–and the mirrored circumstance of my own sadness–easy enough to recognize–was right out there between us. 

What has stayed with me was how Ilene put up with hearing of my storied love affair, then over months how she helped pull together a book of poems about it. I knew it then and know it still. Jacobs Press did a brief run of books, and I could only say, “thank you.” Next to the last poem Ilene published was In the Fall of the Year (St. Stephen’s Track)  And for the book’s closing: Her Leaning Chair. 

October 2002, Ryan killed himself. The instigation was a girl who broke up with him, though the underlying depression was the true cause. It was his freshman year at Virginia Tech. Ryan was a far faster study than I had been, and reading his emails I felt every exquisite bit of his pain. 

I knew I needed to call Ilene. If I hadn’t she would have been hurt. She was forever wanting to hear about Sean and Ryan. In her world, sorrow and joy have always gone together with the people she cares about.  Equanimous in a way I’ve never managed–I’m more the ‘rage against the night’ kind. 

I begged her to come. “We’ll put you up. Please!” I needed my people to help me bury him. So she and her beautiful daughter, Jessica, drove eight hours north. Jammed wall to wall in our house at the wake, Ilene and I spoke all of a few minutes, then they left again to drive home to South Carolina. 

I began this piece during the Christmas holidays–it’s a time of year when you think of the people you’ve loved in your life. Thirty years have passed, and I’m now married to D, though occasionally I’ll check in with Ilene by email; Ilene is no longer a fan of letter writing. She tells me she’s a grandmother to a football player, her daughter’s son. We don’t expect to be intimate in each other’s life–that’s a long time in the past–but if I needed her to speak plainly, she would, and I would do the same. In that way we honor our past. 

This evening, Pandora is playing Mr Jones by Counting Crows which I haven’t heard in quite some time. Earlier, the site played another Counting Crows song, Sullivan Street, Duritz’ lyrics accompanied by a single guitar. These are songs of youth sung by a youngster. D and I have listened to them ever since our honeymoon on Seabrook Island when we sat on a beach looking out on the ocean with a battery operated CD player playing in the background. Where do these kid musicians come from anyway? 

If I’m going to hell, it’s not for want of trying.