"Peter, I've got an extra ticket for the Streisand concert. Would you like to go?"
Ordinarily I wouldn't be caught dead at a Barbra Streisand concert, but there were two reasons why I'd set that scruple aside now: Laura was really attractive and this was a fundraising concert, because Streisand was campaigning hard for my candidate, Bella Abzug, in the Democratic primary. It was May, 1970.
"Good seats?" That was dumb, and I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth.
"Not really," she said, downcast. "It's the low-price area."
I'm sorry," I said, trying to retrieve the situation. "I just didn't want you to be out a lot of money. I know you're still in college."
The show was at the Palladium, on 14th Street. Streisand could really pack people in, and there were a lot of faces Laura and I recognized from the newspapers. She put on a good show and got a couple of name singers to join her on stage, which enhanced things and got a very favorable review in the Post the next day.
"Laura Pigtails," as I thought of her, was a junior at Cornell who had walked into campaign headquarters at the beginning of the month and was around almost every day, doing whatever had to be done She favored gray sweatshirts and jeans and was several inches shorter than me. Her lovely oval face and the longest braid of hair I'd ever seen on a woman on the streets of New York made her seem quite young.
I'd joined the campaign as the scheduler, tasked to move the candidate around the district. I got her into senior centers, community meetings, and waterfront bars. She rode commuter buses, stood outside subway stops, and accosted people in movie theater lines. It was a difficult job, not technically but because the candidate was by nature undisciplined and abusive. The only reason I hadn't quit was because I couldn't get a word in edgewise as one campaign manager after another resigned first. Also, I needed the money.
After the concert Laura and I went to a nearby café and talked. She was a native New Yorker, a graduate of one of the snitzy private schools on the West Side, and went to Cornell because her father was a professor at Columbia and could get a reduced tuition rate at an in-state school.
My relationship with Carol, my assistant scheduler, was pretty much over and I was looking for someone new. Laura was lively enough to hold her own in the super-charged political talk of the campaign; feminist enough not to fall into the snares of the hyper-feminist and lesbian battles that raged around us few male workers; and she was really cute.
"Are you working the flatbed shows Streisand is doing this weekend, Laura?"
"The 10 o'clock one, in the Village. I'll be a block away with the flyers that some idiot produced spelling her name 'Barbara.' We can't afford to print new ones but if she sees them she'll flip out."
"Uh, that idiot was me." Somehow it never sank in with me about how she liked her name spelled, so I'd written, approved, and paid for the 5,000 flyers without consulting anyone.
"You are really lucky that Bella needs you. She's furious and if she ever found out —"
"Please don't tell her! She'll hang me up by my balls! I really need this job."
Laura laughed. "Deal."
"Thanks. Are you going to jump up to the third concert when you're finished in the Village?"
"Nope, the Upper West Side volunteers are doing that. One appearance and I'm done for the weekend."
"Great. I'll have the Sunday-Monday-Tuesday schedule done by then. Want to see a movie?"
"At 10 o'clock?"
"Sure. There are a couple of the chain theaters on the East Side where the first show is 9:30 or 10."
So early on Saturday morning that the sun wasn't up I was coming back from our Brooklyn printers with 5,000 reprinted flyers for the Village show. Bella was beside herself and demanded they be reprinted. I probably still had my job because I had a car and could drive to Brooklyn and come back with that much printing in time.
I had no time to return the car to the parking garage space I rented down by the piers before my date with Laura. Instead, I found a parking spot near the movie theater where we had agreed to meet.
"A car? You keep a car in New York? Are you rich?"
"I really like the freedom it provides. I can visit my friends in Vermont and New Hampshire whenever I want, provided Bella lets me have the time off. And parking at the piers is cheap, it just takes an hour-and-a-half to get back to my apartment by subway."
I don't remember what the movie was. I suggested we get lunch.
"Come to my apartment. I'll make lunch."
Laura lived with her parents in one of the newly constructed coops on the West Side. We circled the block three times before we found a spot just large enough to fit my VW. As we walked to her apartment we saw a brass plaque embedded in the pavement. It memorialized Michey Schwerner, who had been murdered in 1964 during Mississippi Freedom Summer and who had grown up in the neighborhood.
We took off our shoes in the vestibule, as her parents didn't want road dirt tracked into the apartment. Laura excused herself to change out of her campaign outfit (Bella liked the clean-cut look for her street workers), so I had a chance to look around.
The huge living room window provided a spectacular view of the Hudson. There was a good-sized living-dining room, an eat-in kitchen, a master suite with bath, two other bedrooms, and a bathroom down the hall. Her father used one of the bedrooms as an office since her older brother had gotten married and moved out. Because the apartment was on a high floor, even the impending construction of a building on the empty ground to the immediate west of this building wouldn't impede the view.
Laura returned in her regular Cornell outfit and quickly set about whipping up a monster mushroom omelet. In the course of conversation she dropped the fact that her parents were out of town visiting friends and wouldn't be back until late Sunday.
"That was delicious. Do you like to cook?"
"Actually, this is one of the few things I do well. I live in a coop in Ithaca and have to take my turn in the kitchen, so I've learned a few things. I serve a really good beer, though," and we laughed.
I wanted to get a ground-eye view of the Hudson from the lot next to her building, so we took the elevator down to the basement and went out the service door.
The 2 o'clock sun was so blazingly hot that it took my breath away. I nearly fainted. Laura had to guide me into the basement and up the elevator to her apartment. I was still pretty shaky as she made me lie down on her bed. She wrapped my head in a cold towel and closed the curtains. I fell asleep.
It was dark in the room and I needed to pee. As I came out of the bathroom I heard rattling in the kitchen and I padded in on Laura washing dishes and singing to herself.
I couldn't help it.
I lifted her pigtail over her head and, when she turned around, kissed her. She jumped away but ran into the sink.
"Oh Peter, you started me!"
"I'm sorry, Laura, it was just too lovely to pass up. I've wanted to have that pigtail in my hands since I met you."
"You like?"
"Very much."
"And the kiss?"
"All part of the service —" which was interrupted by her mouth on mine.
Lips locked, we staggered back to the living room and sat down on the couch. My tongue met hers and they wrestled, inconclusively. I put my hands under her sweatshirt and found she had no bra on, but before I could do anything about it she pulled away and stood up.
"Peter, this isn't what — damn — I can't — just because — "
