Jessica Jewett
One of the sleaziest dickheads I’ve
ever known was an advertising agency creep who bought an old house down near
the foot of Claremont Avenue
Somehow, he obtained a stop-traffic-gorgeous 17-year-old
school-dropout girlfriend named Jessica.
Jessica was six feet tall, slim and
stacked, and had abundant blond hair, flashing blue eyes, and a smile featuring
what seemed like an amazing number of perfectly configured and blindingly white
teeth. It was summer when I met her and she always wore next to nothing,
although sometimes she did wear in-line roller skates. She was, of course,
usually stoned. More surprisingly, she was also friendly and flirtatious with
me. I didn’t know if she was that way with everyone, or what, but I appreciated
it.
We ended up being friends, even long
after her affaire with the
advertising creep ended. She seemed to think that I was an intellectual, a
“beatnik genius”, as she told me once, and she seemed to think I was an
adornment of some sort on her scene. She showed me the trophy she’d won at a
ping-pong tournament when she’d been thirteen or fourteen.
I remember one time I was driving her
somewhere, I think to a legendary Italian lunch restaurant near the big wholesale
produce markets, and she leaned out my car window, flashed her million megawatt
smile, and waved – at the world in general, as far as I could tell. At least
one male driver slammed on his brakes and several swerved out of their lanes,
fucking up traffic in both directions for about a block either way. I was
impressed on multiple levels. She could actually fuckin stop traffic.
I did have one window of opportunity,
not long after her break-up with the ad-creep, to consummate the unavoidable
lust I continually had for her. I blew it. Drugs. She’d come by my house, and
we had begun getting physical for the first time, on my waterbed. I couldn’t
believe my luck. Then she told me she had to go meet a girlfriend of hers at
some night club out on the Austin Highway, but that if I showed up after
midnight or so, I could ‘pick her up’ and take her back to my place. But I was
coming down from some substance abuse, and by the time midnight or so rolled
around had reached the severely incapable phase of the process; I couldn’t even
get my sorry ass out to the car to drive to the club, and that was that.
And so Jessica blended into the scene.
My friend Chris dubbed her “Bimbo Deluxe”. She got a succession of jobs that
involved being pretty a lot, such as being a receptionist, and the like. She
got an apartment and some beatnik books, and I recommended Bukowski and a
couple other books to her. She invited me to little parties at her place, where
nothing really went on that I could see.
She wore a conspicuous gold cross on a
gold chain around her lovely neck. When I asked her why she wore religious
jewellery, she expressed surprise and said that she didn’t understand what I
meant. I pointed out the gold cross, and she said, “That’s not religious.
That’s just a cross.” Okay.
Not surprisingly, one thing I found it
almost impossible to do was to say no to her. One time in 1981 or 1982 she
roped me into going on a rafting trip down the Guadalupe River with some old
friends of hers — from her early adolescence in her old neighbourhood — and I
got entirely too drunk. I imagine I behaved below my usual standards. I don’t
remember seeing much of Jessica after that.
Joyce Honeychurch
I was scrambling after drivable cabs
while taking a couple of summer school courses in education in 1983. The most
interesting feature of finally taking education courses was a sort of
friendship I developed with the associate professor in charge of my course in
educational sociology, Dr Honeychurch. Joyce.
Joyce was, I estimated, a few years
older than me. How many years I don’t have a clue and wouldn’t even hazard a
guess. She had remarkably pale yellow hair, worn in an unobtrusive professional
cut kind of close to her large head, and a roundish Central-European face. She
had a way of smiling slyly, in which she caught her lower lip with one of her
upper teeth which wasn’t exactly straight. She wore no-nonsense, professional
outfits. Over-the-knee skirts that didn’t move much when she did.
Joyce was a real classroom star — an
entertainer to be sure — demonstrating many of the things she was saying with
physical theatre and good comedy timing. She could, for instance, crawl around
on her hands and knees to demonstrate different learning styles, as I recall
from her first lecture, when her nose was running from some virus. And I
remember her holding off to perfection on the punchline of a story about a
company that demonstrated eye make-up in her daughter’s school, using her daughter
as a model (“My daughter does have beautiful eyes”), and then tried to use this
foot in the door to peddle serious cosmetics to her. Joyce-the-feminist-professional,
y’know? The fool. Sly smile.
She projected a seriously
on-top-of-it, intellectually rigorous persona. Early on she made it clear that
she was, first and foremost, a Stanford alumna. Not a person to be trifled
with, although macho men and the religiously zealous in her classes seemed to
be drawn toward challenging her.
And then, a couple of weeks into the
summer session, she decided to join me in the cafeteria when I was in
mid-lunch, eating (up until then) by myself. I would have guessed her for a
health-food nut, but her tray was covered with a generous quantity of
egregiously greasy food. She packed it away like a movie extra, chatting away
all the while about this and that. I was honoured.
We met for chats fairly often over the
summer, even went out for dinner once at my favourite Japanese restaurant. She
had a son who was backpacking Europe and a
daughter in high school. I don’t recall hearing much about the ex-husband, from
whence came the catch-your-eye Honeychurch tag, but I did learn that the
on-again-off-again boyfriend back in Palo
Alto
Joyce was all set to be my
student-teaching supervisor, but then she got an opportunity to be a low- (or
non-) paid research fellow back at Stanford, and since she’d never liked Texas
all that much, off she went. I guess the thing with the rich boyfriend was
on-again. Anyway, she told me she thought I should go and be a researcher at
FRI instead of becoming a teacher, and offered to write me a killer
recommendation, but I wanted a job with a steady income.
The last time I saw Joyce was in her
snug little office at UTSA. She was packing up her desk and shit to send back
home to Stanford. She gave me some cards with high-quality reproductions of
various pictures by Friedrich Hundertwasser on them. I’d never seen any of his
stuff before. She said she thought they looked like they spoke my language, and
of course they did. But at the time I was in something of a depression over
money, and having to drive cabs instead of concentrating on academic stuff, and
I distractedly left without taking them with me. I regretted this when I
emigrated to New Zealand and
went in search of Hundertwasser’s stomping grounds in the Bay of Islands
A Google search on Joyce’s further academic
career reveals that it took her to Alaska and
the United Arab Emirates
before depositing her at Florida
Gulf Coast
University Alaska , Alaska North Carolina
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