Still 1974, still in Anchorage
Chronologically, this memoir segment runs concurrently with getting to know Charley and the threesome.
In the weeks after Charley got out of jail, before Hulk arrived, he took it on himself to show me around Anchorage and introduce me to Alaska. I knew the Anchorage bowl fairly well, because my apartment and both jobs were there. Beyond the harbor-hugging bowl, and outside the city in the real Alaska, it was all new and unfamiliar. He was a good tour guide because he paid attention to history, and he seemed to know everyone.
On one memorable occasion, we were walking down 4th Avenue and he was telling me about the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, pointing out buildings that had survived and the new buildings on the bluff adjoining the area that had slid away into Cook Inlet. A white-haired man in brown Carhartts and a plaid shirt approached us with a big smile. “Hi Chuck,” he said.
Charley answered, “Hey, Bill, howzit goin’?” They schmoozed a bit and I was introduced to Bill Egan, the first governor of the State of Alaska. It blew me away, at the time, that this ex-con would be on such friendly terms with the ex-gov. But Governor Bill was like that, they were both Jaycees, and I’ve learned to accept that this entire huge state has much in common, socially, with small towns. Anyone who has been here a while and gotten around a bit, knows everyone else who has.
One day we were having coffee in a booth at Mark’s drive-in, the “new” one on Gambell Street across from the original Carr’s supermarket site (both are now gone and Safeway has bought out the whole Carr’s chain) when I saw someone I thought I recognized sitting at the counter. I stared a while, trying to be sure I knew him, and Charley encouraged me to go on over and ask the guy if he was the man I thought he was. Many times, in other contexts, he has encouraged me to step past my fear or hesitation, for which I will always be grateful.
That time, in Mark’s Drive-in, I went over and sat beside the guy at the counter and asked, “Are you known as Loose Lew?” He turned and looked at me and I saw the recognition. He said that he had been called that, at one time, but now he was known as Ed. I asked after my old friend Mardy, who had been married to Lew when I knew them in Oregon (here, there, and when she negotiated for my life), and before that when we had all partied together with Hells Angels in the San Francisco Bay area. Ed told me they had split up and that Mardy now lived with a guy named Terry. He gave me her address, and the phone number of the cosmetology school where she was taking classes.
When next I had some free time, Mardy and I got together and made up for lost time. We had been out of contact since the day I had last seen her, in 1969, in Hulk’s and my little alley hideaway before I went to prison. Shanda, the three-year-old Virgoan gamin running around the house and crawling in my lap, was news to me.
When Hulk got there, he and Mardy renewed an old friendship, and he renewed an equally old and even closer relationship with Ed. Years later, up until Charley and I left Anchorage and moved up the Susitna Valley, Ed and his new wife Robin, Hulk and his wife Mollie, and Charley and I, would go fishing together on the Kenai Peninsula during the big salmon runs.
Shanda and I, like Mardy and I, were soulmates. Through the rest of her childhood, she was my surrogate kid, someone on whom to lavish the care and love my kids were lacking from me, and which I needed to give to someone. Later on, she was like a younger sister and we helped each other through some tough times.
Charley and I, and Stony and his new wife, and Hulk, and Mollie, his new love, went to Terry and Mardy’s wedding that summer. She and I would stay close for the rest of her life, except for a brief estrangement in Shanda’s teens. Shanda was staying with me for a few weeks at Mardy’s request, because of trouble between Shanda and Terry–either physical or sexual abuse or both. I knew it involved abuse and could sense Shanda’s anger. I respected her desire not to talk about details, and encouraged her to vent feelings all that she wanted.
After a week or so, Shanda asked me if I knew her father. I told her yes, and after our conversation, at her request I called her dad, Ed, and let him talk to her on the phone. After Shanda went home and told her mother she had talked to Ed, Terry called me up and cussed me out and Mardy wouldn’t let Shanda see me again until we accidentally ran into each other in Sheep Creek Lodge a few years later. We found out we had been neighbors out here in the Valley a month or so, since they had moved in. When we sat down in that booth at the lodge together, I was just happy to be with her. She was uncomfortable and apologetic until she talked it out and got over having held the grudge so long that I’d moved by the time she tried to call, and we’d lost touch for so long. We never lost touch again.
While Hulk and Charley and I were still living in that little basement apartment in the Anchorage bowl, Stony called me up at work and we reached a friendly reconciliation. His having had a new girlfriend or two since me, and my having a couple of other guys around, prevented any real friction between us. When he indicated that he’d like to be friends, that felt okay for me.
A few weeks later, there he was, asking if we’d take him and his cat, Beaner, in. His girlfriend had kicked them out. When he finally found a new girl and moved in with her a few weeks later, Beaner stayed with us for a further few months, until Stony was in circumstances where he could have a cat. He and his several girlfriends and one wife remained part of our regular circle of co-conspirators, until he left Alaska sometime around 1980, give or take a year or so. I haven’t heard of him since, except for a report from Hulk that he’d moved back to his hometown in Washington and gone fanatically into AA. He will show up in a few more of these memoirs coming up.
The next fifteen or twenty years of my memoirs will have occasional interesting Mardy stories. I still have at least one or two blogs from spring and summer of ’74, some eventful, interesting times. One will be a wrap-up of my two jobs and my narrow escape from the horrible fate of becoming a professional ex-convict. Another will deal with the sweet and peaceful breakup of the threesome when I return from a trek in the wilderness. After that, I have Snow Blind Productions and working security for a series of rock concerts. Then it will be 1975.
While I was digging up the links for my earlier mentions of Mardy, I did some editing to the piece I did last summer, on meeting Janis Joplin the day VW earned his red wings.
I added the shot at left, and did some other editing, to my 
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