Fallen Flower Child

By Robert Lovett

When two college students vie for the love of the same person, can the perfect crime of passion be far behind? In the freewheeling 60's, is desire strong enough to kill for?

Former Wall Steet broker Thomas "Sandy" Wavery uses his last bit of stength to create this confessional memoir, sharing the horrifying truth of what happend to him as a young man in the 1960's.

Follow Sandy's deathbed confession as he leads us through "what he did for love."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Lovett
• Release date: Jul 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465873910

Robert Lovett

Robert Lovett is a writer and former high school English literature teacher who grew up in Westbury, Long Island in the 1960s. He now lives in Hampton Bays, New York and South Beach, Florida. He received his Masters in English Literature from St. John’s University in New York. As office manager at a Hamptons landscape design firm during the spring and summer, he winters in Florida. He has been writing and reading from a young age when he fell in love with the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to Poe, his favorite authors are Ayn Rand, John Gardener, John Updike, and John Irving. When not working, traveling or writing, he enjoys tennis.

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Fallen Flower Child

Robert Lovett

Copyright 2011 by Robert Lovett

Smashwords Edition

Fallen Flower Child

A 60’s Mystery of Passion & Murder

By Robert Lovett

"It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me…"

---E.A. Poe

"Between the wish and its fulfillment is a pit,

And the pit is dark and full of the snakes of disappointment and despair."

---Pauline Gedge

Desire is the cause of all suffering

---Buddhism

Prologue

I am probably the only man in history to have planned and to have nearly executed a double suicide. No, I am not dead yet--not physically, at least. My stricken, sickly body lives on--barely. A body is a surprisingly hard thing to kill. It seems to have a will of its own to survive no matter how dead inside the brain is. It fights one’s mind every step of the way, despite what one’s ego longs for.

I have just turned sixty-five, but I have been dead inside for over a quarter of a century by now. The Worst happened to me when I was about forty years old. Maybe The Worst happened to me even a lot earlier than that, but I will soon get to relating my personal, sad tale of woe.

Somebody once wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living, but I have learned that the opposite of that is true. People who plod through existence living like innocent sheep to the slaughter, numbly shuffling from home to job to kids and television, and back, again and again, day after thoughtless day, until they drop dead in their tracks, actually live much better than I do now. The drones never examine their lives by asking themselves those unnerving Important Questions. They simply march, in step with the crowd, from baptism to grave, gliding across thin ice, never acknowledging the monsters that lurk below them, biding their time, just waiting to swallow them whole--horrors like Disease, Accidents, Wars or……..Murders.

I, on the other hand, have had a very long time to examine MY life, and I must confess that it has been nothing but one unending, living nightmare since that awful day so long ago--that momentous day when I stood at the crossroads of my life and purposely chose the darker path not followed. But telling you that story is still a bit off. I will get to it in time if you are just a little patient with me. I figure that I have still got a couple of months left with nothing better to do than to confess and to die. It will help to pass the days in this filthy, roach-infested, garbage-littered Manhattan apartment which I still call home.

They say that confession is good for the soul. I am curious to find out whether that is true or not. My reckoning day has certainly been a long time in coming! Of course, I don’t actually believe in a soul anymore. Soul is merely a word that the ancient Greeks made up in order to explain how we humans are able to think and to form a consciousness. Despite their age-old wisdom, the Greeks knew next to nothing about brain-functioning.

I do, however, strongly believe in Heaven and Hell, but my belief is not in the conventional versions. Heaven and Hell are Here and Now on this big, blue planet of ours in each of our present lives! Heaven and Hell are what we make of our lives and HOW WE CHOOSE TO LIVE THEM! I am intimately acquainted with Hell on earth by now, because a Living-Hell is what I have made of my life! Yes, Hell is the place where I have barely survived, subject to the tormenting harpies of body and mind for the past twenty-five years!

I faintly recall a song from the play, Pippin, which I once attended. Diana Ross made a hit out of it, if my faulty memory correctly serves me. The song was called What I Did for Love. It ended with the words: Can’t forget, don’t regret what I did for love. My life has taught me that the lyrics to that song are stupid lies---nothing but a medley of pretty, romantic falsehoods! I believe that most of us, especially me, DO end up regretting what they did for love. For many years I struggled to believe that what I did for love was...forgivable and innately human. But, of course, it was not anything even close to being...acceptable.

I was, however, very young at the time, and it was the anything for love all you need is love decade of the freewheeling, amoral Sixties. Way back then, the invincible power of Love was poised to change the world. Almighty Love was everywhere in the air, as ubiquitous as pot smoke and sit-ins! Love, and all of its rainbow-hued manifestations, was so much more than just some intangible asset. One witnessed the intoxicating Power of Love everywhere one looked, from protest marches, dairy farm concerts, love-ins and to college orgies! Requited Love had somehow become an entitlement for all! I, like almost everyone else in that flower-powered decade, felt that I, too, rightfully deserved my fair share of the Love craze! Like most of my peers, I simply went a bit...overboard when MY slice of the delicious, seductive love pie was finally laid before my eyes and tantalizingly set mere inches from my reach! Of course, as I soon discovered to my eternal dismay, temporary insanity could never justify what I then proceeded to do in the name of love.

Please excuse my ranting and rambling, but my brain does not work as efficiently as it used to back in the golden days of my successful career as a Wall Street stockbroker. My memory is no longer very sharp, and I am often prone to nightmarish delusions. I will explain all of this later on in my narrative. I only write when I am feeling up to the chore, and that is not very often nowadays. Please be generous and also excuse any lapses or factual errors throughout this confession. Names and places may have been changed to protect the innocent, as they say on the hypnotic idiot box nowadays. I have purposely kept some other things deliberately vague, such as the name of my alma mater, the true names of the minor characters, etc., etc. Other omissions and inconsistencies are probably due to my degenerating mental faculties. You will also have to overlook the occasional ranting and raving contained in this confession. Once again, you can just chalk it up to the mental instability accompanying the ruthless, merciless diseases, both mental and physical, which are slowly eating their way through me.

I plan to leave this confessional memoir on my apartment desk after I die. It will serve as my message to the world, and to ONE special person in particular. I have always been too cowardly to go to the authorities with my confessions. Perhaps by leaving this lengthy statement as my last will and testament, I will have made up in some tiny way for my crimes of commission as well as omission. Do not worry about my having gotten away with anything! Justice has already been MORE THAN rightly served! I have paid the ultimate price for my crime a thousand times over, here inside of my self-made prison. I have never really required any kind of institutional punishment. Imprisonment would probably have even been the EASY way out for me! What I have done to MYSELF the past few decades is far more tormenting then any sentence a civilized judiciary would have handed down against me. An impartial jury would have had, at least, a modicum of sympathy for me and, perhaps, have had some understanding of WHAT I did and WHY I did it. Again, this is something you will comprehend soon enough in the course of my confession. YOU, dear Reader, can be my Judge and Jury now!

Alright, that is enough bullshitting by way of introduction. The moment has arrived to turn back time, as Cher sung. Let me now take you back to the freewheeling Sixties so that you can more fully comprehend what I am trying to tell you here. I truly do not care how you judge me now. Anyway, by the time you read this, I will probably be infinitely beyond all thought and caring, forever lost in that vast, featureless desert of black, eternal Nothingness we atheists see as our welcome respite from the pitiful existence some of us have created for ourselves.

Maybe my miserable autobiography might have some worth if it prevents just a single person from ever even contemplating doing what I did for love. As you will soon learn, the old adage that crime does not pay applies a hundred-thousand-fold to ME! And, as I wrote before, the damage that one does to ONESELF in committing such atrocities far outweighs anything society can do to punish the transgressor!

Fellow pilgrim, now that you stand, trembling, at the gates of my personal, formerly private version of Hell-on-earth, let me attempt to describe to you the twisted path I CHOSE to arrive there!

CHAPTER I

My nightmare began innocently enough at a Boston train station one warm, late summer afternoon over forty-five years ago. Annabel Lee Davies was the second most beautiful person, inside as well as outside, that I had ever known. She had been given her famous first and middle names because her Bohemian parents had been fervent admirers of Edgar Allan Poe. Annabel Lee Davies had always belonged only to me---in the Platonic sense, of course.

Annabel, who I called Bel for short, was standing on the train platform, anxiously awaiting my imminent arrival from New York City for my freshman fall semester. I had spotted her the instant that the train had pulled into the station. She was wearing her fashionable, hip-hugging, bell-bottom jeans, a tight, tie-dyed tee shirt, sandals and granny glasses. Her long, blonde, sunlit hair was streaming down her shoulders, shooting shards of yellow light whenever she tossed her head. My favorite flower child was tall, slim and lightly-muscled for a girl. She stood about my height at five foot ten inches. Bel had a small, curvaceous, tightly packed ass that always drew admiring glances from passer-bys. She was a female jock. Bel had been a high school track and field hockey star who had won a scholarship to the New England college we had picked together so that we would both be attending the same school that fall. We had once pledged to each other that nothing or no one was ever going to separate us, and we each intended to keep that childhood promise.

Bel’s father was a very successful Dead Artist whose neon colored flower paintings now sold in the six figures. Her widowed mother made a comfortable living by releasing a slow but steady stream of his older works to Southebys each year for auctioning off. Our families had always lived close by in our respective Manhattan townhouses. My dad and Bel’s dad had become good friends over the years before the painter’s early demise. Theirs had been an unusually close relationship, given the fact that my father was a Wall Streeter and Bel’s dad was an artist. Due to the closeness of our two families, Bel and I had known each other since infancy. We had grown up together and had been best pals our entire lives. At that critical point in my young existence, Bel was still my most cherished friend.

Bel smiled and flashed me the peace sign when she finally saw me staring out of the train window at her.

I was soon bounding down the train steps and alighting onto the platform. I ran to Bel and enfolded her in my arms, happy to inhale the meadow-fresh fragrance of her newly shampooed hair. Then, I enthusiastically kissed her on the cheek.

God, I’ve missed you so much the past couple of weeks! I exclaimed. Life’s so goddamned boring without you around!

C’mon, Sandy, it’s only been about a month! You know that I had to get here early this summer to begin my training. You couldn’t possibly have missed me that much already!

I paid the porter who had just deposited my bags alongside of us.

Finally meet the love of your life while I was out of town? Bel teased.

You know that you’re the only love of my life! I cheerfully shot back.

Yeah, RIGHT! We both know that I lack the right…equipment for you!

Oh, quit hassling me and grab a hold of one of these monsters! I said, gesturing towards the big, stuffed suitcases my overly-protective mother had insisted upon packing for me. I wondered if Mother had sewn name labels into all of my underwear. Even though we were rich, she seemed to enjoy fretting over silly things like my losing a few pair of underwear.

Bel wrestled up my largest suitcase and began waddling from the platform. I knew that Bel was stronger than me. Although not of college caliber, I remained a fervid swimmer. I had acquired a very respectable, compact swimmer’s physique from the days I had spent on my high school swimming team. By the way, everybody called me Sandy, although it was not my given name, because of my thick mane of blond hair which I wore in soft curls down to my shirt collar. My longish hairstyle was about as revolutionary as I dared to go, given the overwhelmingly conservative bent of my two Wasp, Republican parents.

Bel led me to her car in the station parking lot. I followed her breathlessly, lugging all of my other suitcases. Bel’s car was a van of fairly recent vintage. She had had it repainted pink and had personally emblazoned it with big, stick-on, day-glow, orange daisy heads. Large, neon love and peace bumper stickers adorned the front and back fenders. Bel had actually really been to Woodstock, and I was constantly awed by her ability to flaunt all of the conventions with her strident, unabashed hippiedom.

Well, did you at least go out for fun while you were sulking back home all alone by yourself? Bel persisted.

What’s with the interrogation, Bel? Do you want me to write an essay about what I did last summer? Why are you suddenly so goddamned curious about my personal life? You could’ve at least written me a few letters about YOURS!

You know I was very busy practicing field hockey and making new friends. Now that we’re here in college, it’s about time for us to both begin meeting new people! I can’t be around all the time to be your…cover forever! Bel chided. You hafta begin making a few friends of your own now. I can’t be with you every day like in the past at home! High school is over now---for good!

We tossed my luggage into the back of the van. I got in while Bel started the car and drove out of the parking lot.

Once on the road, I began to stare at Bel’s pert, flawless profile as she effortlessly navigated the maze of superhighways which led out of Boston. As so often in the past, I was forced to realize how jealous I was of her tanned, unblemished complexion. I did not have bad skin, but, like most guys my age, I was often plagued with the dreaded, occasional pimple or two. I was also beginning to have to shave my peach fuzz which often left my tender skin red, raw and nicked with tiny cuts from my unforgiving single blade razor. Lucky Bel would never have to deal with such hassles. Even her smooth, long legs did not require much maintenance. I knew that beneath her bells, her lightly-calved, tan legs were as hairless as a baby’s ass and completely free of any unsightly stubble.

Didn’t you go out and investigate any of those bars I wrote down for you before I left? That’s probably the only way you’re ever going to meet any guys of your own….inclinations, Bel persisted, squinting through her granny glasses as she concentrated upon the road ahead of us.

The blazing sun was directly above us. I was nearly blinded by its unforgiving glare. I began thinking of all of those thermonuclear explosions occurring across the face of the sun. I felt that I was about to experience an explosion all my own if I soon did not find some relief from my strong, increasingly insistent sex drive. Hiding my homosexuality through grammar and high school had been easy with Bel as my beard. I had actually sometimes enjoyed playing hetero with my best girl, Bel. Neither she nor I had felt any pressing needs for genuine love interests in those days. One of the best times of my young life at that point, had been the evening that Bel and I had spent fooling our classmates at our Senior Prom. We had danced until dawn, drunk ourselves silly, and passed out together in some flea-bitten motel in Queens. Everyone at school had concluded that we had fucked ourselves sore that night. I ended up the envy of every straight boy within ten miles of prestigious Stanton High!

I really don’t want to meet those kinds of people. They’re just all too...faggoty for me! I protested. You know what I like by now! I’m always falling in love with straight boys!

Well, it’s about time you got over that shit and got REAL with yourself! Bel said. Impossible Dreams always end up being so depressing! I know that better than anyone else! Now that you’re a college man, it’s time for you to accept who you are and get on with your life. It’s time for you to grow up and stop…playing make believe! You and I just can’t play tea with each other for the rest of our lives, Sandy! What are you gonna do with yourself when I finally meet someone---special?

You mean to tell me you’re not a dyke? I laughingly teased.

Just because I’m a female jock doesn’t mean I’m Billy Jean King! I like guys just as much as YOU do!

There, I told myself, it was out in the open again. My Special Secret had been voiced for all to hear. I actually looked around us to make sure that no other car was close enough to hear through open windows. The coast was clear. We were speeding down the turnpike, en route to Anselum University. We were almost all alone on the road at that time of day.

Bel was the only person with whom I had shared my Special Secret. Yes, I was gay, although I think that the term was rarely used in the sixties. I had confessed to Bel that I was into guys around the age of twelve when I could contain myself no longer. I had had to tell someone. Who better to keep my Special Secret than my Special Best Friend! Ever since that day, Bel had remained my sole confessor, sharing the ups and downs of my crushes and smugly