The Lady in the Yellow Voltswagon

 

04/07/80

 

They saw the past always catches up with you, faces drift out of that fog of memory and speak.

 Last night, a woman smiled and pulled me aside, asking how I was, and I was too stunned to speak for a moment, staring at this beautiful face as she dragged me to the bar for a drink. By time I remembered who she was I was sorry I had, feeling my face grow warm, seeing it grow red in the mirror behind the bar.

 She was one of the harpies that had hung around the band at the end of its glitter phase, a darling woman in silk blouses who had seduced the band one member at a time until she'd come to me, and I being too stupid and hurt from my marriage to appreciate the offer, wanted something more than sex, refusing to be one of the boys. She came on hard back then, and I ... living my vision of poetry then ... wrote her a poem declaring myself immune when I wasn't. She read the poem and was insulted.

 Pauly tried to minimize my social gaff by patting me on the shoulder and telling me she was nothing but a social whore who I didn't want to associate with anyway, but I had wanted to, and still wanted to when I met her last night, only I had lost my chance.

 She did clear up one small mystery that had puzzled me for a while, a mystery that had seemed unrelated to the band. For several years, while I jogged along the river, a woman in a yellow VW Bug beeped at me in the morning. I waved, but could not see the face behind the squat windshield, a face, I learned last night, was hers.

 She was not coming on last night, she had only pulled me aside to say hello, and then, got ready to move on again, when a local lady killer named Owie came over to the bar to hit on her, asking what she was doing that night and if she wanted to relive old memories.

 "Go away, Owie," she laughed, "I'm busy."