Busted with Ilene
Pilgrim spends time Bronxville and Long Island
Finally, some authority tangentially responsible for guarding the dubious virtue of girls at Sarah Lawrence: stumbled upon the arrangement at Ilene’s dorm. This may have been due to that crummy brush-painted VW with its exposed engine, or: it could have been a tip. Either way, things were getting “sticky”. Pilgrim emerged one morning and found his car wouldn’t start. The first thing was to go to the exposed engine in back and pop the distributor cap. The rotor was gone; totally missing! So he went to the glove compartment and grabbed his spare rotor. Now he started the car, and drove out of the parking lot. As he drove out: two pickup trucks with Sarah Lawrence logos entered the lot: closely followed by a tow truck.
The very next day: Pilgrim and Ilene were summoned to the campus facilities office, and were told by a harried looking guy: to “break it up”. Ilene got on the phone immediately and found Pilgrim a gig. He was to repair a Volkswagen for people living on the Long Island Sound at Greenwich, Connecticut: just a little north of the college.
When he arrived: Pilgrim was shown in by the cook. The cook was a cool black guy probably in his sixties, who smoked “grass” at the kitchen table along with the other house guests. The home’s owner was a pallid young guy, with bushy dark eyebrows and hair. He was working on his latest entrepreneurial venture: making Quaaludes in industrial quantities inside two of the small garages below the house.
Pilgrim’s first assignment was to upload about forty small heavy boxes marked “Chevron Petrochemical”. These came from a rented van out on the driveway: its whole body sunk to the tops of its tires. After that, he was shown the Volkswagen in another garage. It was a decent looking squareback belonging to one of the owner’s friends: a young guy with a Jersey accent, and shock of hair falling over the left side of his face. He talked just like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”.
The Squareback VW needed some injectors, hoses, a new starter, a battery, two front brake calipers, disks, and new brake pads. Pilgrim wrote it all out, with probable prices for the parts: then took his ammo box of tools and started disassembling the vehicle. The house owner quibbled when one of the brake calipers and its pads appeared OK. The pads were OK, except both were coated with brake fluid. Pilgrim was doing his best to please: so he lit the soaked pads on fire to try to burn off the excess fluid. Brake pads in those days were pure asbestos.
Life at that house was quite leisurely. The old cook sat at the table telling stories and smoking grass all day long. Swells crashed on the cliffs below. The wind blew. Snow fell. Everyone came downstairs when they felt like it and got coffee cake sausage and eggs. Pilgrim quickly adapted to the pace, and worked a couple hours a day. He went out “for parts”, had a beer at a local bar, and proceeded south to hang out with Ilene.
When he was done, the engine came to life immediately but the car drove oddly. When you stepped on the brakes, it veered to the right. Of course it did!: that was the side opposite those fluid-soaked pads! Pilgrim later learned: the owner’s young friend got drunk one icy night, and drove it up the back of another car. He totally wrecked it, and tore up his face.
Meanwhile, Ilene was showing him around New York City’s boroughs. She took him to a party at a high school classmate’s home in Brooklyn. Attending the party was a houseful of high school friends. The owners’ son was a straight-talking New York City guy, who complained he would never earn enough to own a house like his parent’s. He obviously adored her. In fact she appeared to lord over all of them.
Pilgrim kept neutral: did not mention his high school memories, and tried to stay out of the “line of fire”.
They went to Chinatown in Manhattan, to Central Park, and to the Automat. He remembered the automat from his epic hitch hiking trip in Book II. They also had dinner one night with her family on Avenue B. It was an apartment near the top floor of a six or eight story apartment house block, overlooking “the elevated” (subway) just across the street.
Her father was obviously curious about life in general, and of course: interested in Pilgrim. But because he was also curious and speculative, and easy to talk to. After a string of curious “question and answer” paragraphs volleyed back and forth: they reached a truce. Ilene’s older sister was also at their table. She seemed opposite in temperament: very meek.
By the end of that month Pilgrim was very good at maneuvering his odd VW through Greenwich, Manhattan and Brooklyn. He could negotiate the Bay Shore, remember which streets had ramps at the Hudson thruway, and which cross streets got you onto the Brooklyn Bridge.
Life of Pilgrim: Book III and the other seven in this memoir available on Amazon