I was privileged to be able to do a little curb-sitting over the weekend. Curb-sitting and howling at the moon. Can't tell you how long it's been since I enjoyed a good curb, but from the immense satisfaction I got from the experience, I know it's been far too long. There's just something about being down at the earth level that feels good to me. Sitting down low that like you become cognizant of the tiniest lifeforms all around you. Watch the ants scurrying along. Enjoy the sight of a dung beetle rolling his treasure toward some unknown destination, each minuscule bump in the ground looming like a hill to be conquered.

I like sitting in stairwells, too, and watching the world go by. One of my very favorite memories is of an afternoon I spent with my friend Terry sitting in the stairwell of the original Rock & Roll Heaven. It was Mother's Day. Terry always called on Mother's Day. He was one of the few people who even knew that I was a mother. And knowing the sad circumstances through which I was separated from my daughter, he never failed to let me know that someone was thinking of me on that day.

This particular Mother's Day, though, he decided to drop by with a bottle of Bacardi 151 as a present. We mixed up a batch of cuba libres, turned the stereo up, threw open the stained glass French doors and took up residence on the stairwell. The sunbeams danced off the many-colored panes and reflected the hues of the rainbow all around us. We sat there drinking 151, watching the world go by outside, getting roaring drunk. He told me about turning 19 years old in the middle of a swamp in Vietnam. Said he was crouched there, up to his waist in blackwater slime, leeches sucking the life out of him and it started raining like hell. Suddenly he realized it was his birthday. He was 19. He thought, "What am I doing here?"

He really opened up to me, talking about a past that had long been a dark secret to the rest of us. Terry never talked about himself. It just wasn't his way. But he talked to me that Mother's Day, the emotions created by his Vietnam experiences spilling out of him like the cargo of an overturned apple barrel.

Terry and I first met in 1982 when we both happened to hire in at the same aerospace firm at about the same time. We were working crew provisions for the early Shuttle flights. The physical attraction between us was immediate and intense, and got in the way in almost every respect. He was married, and his baby daughter was less than a year old. I was single, for all practical purposes, since Lightnin was at that time doing a stretch in "school" for manslaughter. It was tough being a slammer widow and my head was turned by the tall, slender draftsman with the devilish twinkle in his eye.

We struggled along like the North and South ends of two magnets trying to maintain a distance. The physical attraction was overwhelming so we were together a lot. He was always hanging at my desk or I was hanging at his. Every Friday afternoon the gang from work would go to the local Bennigan's after the day's duty and party down until the wee hours. Terry and I were always together at those gatherings, torturing one another by our sheer presence. Maybe we should have just gone out to the parking lot and gotten it on one night to purge it from our systems. But we didn't. We were trying very hard to play by the rules.

His wife didn't like me very much; she was suspicious and jealous of me, as well she should have been. Hell, she could feel the vibes! The woman wasn't stupid. She was with us sometimes, and the sexual tension between us was so great that it could have been felt by a deaf, dumb and blind man. Why Sharon tolerated our friendship, I will never know.

He liked to take me riding on his motorcycle. We'd strike out on our lunch hour going here, going there, just going. We loved to ride. He loved speed and power and really put that Suzuki through some hard paces. One time we were rounding a corner on the freeway interchange and ran straight into a big puddle of oil that some vehicle had dumped in the middle of the road. Down we went, both of us riding the Suzuki all the way to the ground. I pulled my right leg out from under her just as she connected with the asphalt. Both of us returned to work decorated in oil and road grime from our heads to our toes.

We even managed to get fired together. On the very same day. At the very same hour. So we threw the contents of his desk in the back of my car, got on his motorcycle and rode to the nearest beer joint where we poured it in our ear until closing time. It took us both about three days to sober up. After that, Terry sought employment and I sought the unemployment office. He'd been fired for a bad attitude, which was not compensable according to the Texas Employment Commission, but I'd been fired for refusing to apply for a security clearance I didn't need. My dismissal was totally illegal and the company knew it. They didn't contest my application for benefits. So I went on the Government teat and he went to work for a container company across town.

About two weeks later I received a phone call from Sharon. Terry was riding his motorcycle to work that morning when he was hit broadside by a car. He was in the hospital with his arm all banged up and broken in about a million pieces. She said I was the only one he wanted her to call. I went straight to the hospital, where I found him with his arm and shoulder in some kind of contraption which gave him a distinct resemblance to Frankenstein. Big steel rods protruding from his arm, connected to some stainless steel mainframe which held it all together. I said, "Sheesh, boy, don't you know enough to get out of the way of those cars?" He said, "Hell, the guy was getting away. I had to speed up just to hit him."

He went through months of intense pain and suffering as his arm healed. I was footloose and fancy free, living off my weekly unemployment stipend, so I was his transportation and his partner-in-crime. Sharon used their only car to get to her job (the motorcycle was a goner), so he'd drive my car to the doctor and let me tag along. Eventually he was able to go back to work. Still unemployed, I'd ride my Harley across town to his job and meet him for lunch. He'd found himself a car by that time, one with an automatic transmission so he could drive it with one arm, and we'd ride around in the car, cruising through the peaceful surburban neighborhoods looking at landscaping and architectural design and listening to the radio. Sometimes we didn't even talk. We just enjoyed being in each other's company.

Through the years we remained close friends but I think it was more in spite of me than because of me. He had just made up his mind at some point that he loved me; I was his friend, and no matter how stupidly I acted or what kind of PITA (Pain In The ...) I might be at any given moment, he overlooked it. Sharon and I became good friends, too, after his accident. We were all thrown together a lot more, with me helping Terry get back and forth to the doctor, and we all got to know one another as family. I watched their kids grow up and remembered all their birthdays and they remembered mine.

We shared Thanksgivings and Christmases, went camping and riding together, became a major force in each other's lives. We even burned the furniture at Rock & Roll Heaven together one night. Meanwhile Lightnin got out of jail and came home, and a whole new era began as he resumed his drumming career. Soon Terry and Sharon were regular customers at whatever club Lightnin happened to be working. They weren't out there all the time, of course, because they had a family, but they came out once every two or three weeks to be supportive. They even showed up at some of the worst hellholes he worked, places where no one in their right mind would ever seek entertainment. But Terry knew that having a few friends in the audience was better than playing to an empty house. So they came.

The years rolled on by. I don't know when, where, or how the intense physical attraction that had brought us together transmuted, but somewhere along the way it changed into a deep and abiding bond, made even more meaningful and treasured because of the way we had arrived at it. Precisely because we hadn't given in to those initial desires, because we had never crossed the line of appropriate behavior in spite of how badly we had wanted to, our friendship was even more precious and fulfilling. He never forgot my birthday, or Mother's Day, or the anniversary date of our firing. And when Lightnin and I broke up, he was the one who stopped by to comfort me, checking to see if my car needed the oil changed or the tires rotated.

And then he was gone. Poof! Just like that. One day another call came from Sharon, from another hospital, saying that I was the one Terry wanted her to call. It seemed that the blood transfusions he received years earlier had been carrying the AIDS virus. The damned stuff had him before anybody knew it. He got sick with a cold, which immediately went into pneumonia. I arrived at the hospital in time to hold his hand and tell him I loved him. It took that motorcycle wreck almost nine years to kill him, but he was just as dead in the end.

In death he made me realize that our friends are a mighty precious gift. Lightnin asked to go to the funeral with me, in spite of the fact that I wasn't speaking to him at the time. I said sure, that would be cool. I didn't want to wake up some morning to a phone call telling me that Lightnin was gone and know that I'd been mad at him when he split. Suddenly all the things he'd done which had hurt me so badly just didn't seem important any more. So together we consigned our friend to the earth. Then we went back to Rock & Roll Heaven and killed a bottle of Bacardi 151 in remembrance.

 The Face of Time