Freque Factory, Chapter 2

Freque Factory

Chapter 2

     I was not Monique's only female friend, of course.  She stayed loyal to her friends for years.  Once we got to high school I met her friends from elementary school.  There were 3 that stood out, Susan, Betty, and Cherie.  Susan and Betty were in our circle of friends for years.

     Susan was short, about Monique's size with average looks.  I don't know if I ever saw her natural hair color.  She died it blonde the years I knew her.  Susan fought a continual battle with the scale.  She always drank died coke.  And very, very slowly.  I think the most epic was when she started her soda as she left on a trip to Las Vegas.  She finally took the last sip as they were pulling into the hotel parking lot in Vegas.

   Her parents divorced when she was pretty young.  Since her dad traveled a lot for work, she lived with her mom.  As part of the divorce, Susan's mom got ownership of her own bar.  I don't know what she was like when she was younger, but I experienced Susan's mom as a tough, hard working woman who cared a lot about her family.  Unfortunately, the hours she had to keep as a bar owner meant she wasn't home afternoons and evenings most of the time.

  I think Susan's dad worked in the oil industry.  He always seemed to have a lot of money.  When he was in town he'd visit and buy her affection with that money.  I always thought that her need of male approval came from her dad.  She would dress in ways that would have gotten me grounded. She attracted all sorts of male attention.  It was sad.  She always appeared rather busty.  It turned out she  augmented the limited what little she had.  That fact came out when one young man tried to grab her breast and came away with a handful of Kleenex.  Susan lived that down, but she always had a reputation of being "easy."

    Betty was Susan's best friend.  You almost saw the one without the other.  Betty was very shy and beautiful in a petite way.  She was almost the ideal of a hippie, slender with long brown hair.  She had beautiful brown eyes that almost always seemed sad, except when when she was planning mischief.  Betty was deep.  It was hard to really get to know her.  Sometimes I think Susan was the only one who did.  I never knew much about Betty's family.  They were sort of non-entities.    Susan and Betty discovered so much together.  In their freshman year of high school it was drugs and sex.

   Betty had the misfortune to get involved with Bart, who would intersect with our lives many times later.  He was a tall, heavyset high school senior.  It boggled our innocent imaginations to figure out how he and Betty could have had sex.  But they did.  Betty vanished for about 3 months of our freshman year.  Officially she had gone to help a sick aunt.  Betty swore us to secrecy.  In reality, she had gone to Mexico for an abortion and then spent some time recovering from the effects.  I'm not sure she was ever the same after.

   The third friend I got to know was Cherie.  I thought I was overweight, but she really was.  Despite that, she insisted on wearing the latest fashions.  On Monique or Betty a super tight, short skirt with fish net stockings looked cute.  On Cherie it looked overblown and trashy, in my opinion.  I had gym class with Cherie that year and found her to be sweet and sensible.  She was comfortable with her own size.  She taught me a lot.  Unfortunately, her family moved out of the area that summer and we only saw her when she'd come to visit family still in the area.

   Although I found them to be interesting people, I tended to keep my distance from Susan and Betty.  My family was middle class and my prejudice was showing.  I knew my parents wouldn't approve of either of them.  Monique didn't care.  She stayed friends with them, though she did keep away from the sex and drugs.  Me too.

   One of the big things in our lives was the music.  Our freshman year was when underground FM radio stations were playing music we had never heard of before.  We found out about the San Francisco brand of rock and roll well before the Monterey Pop Festival exposed the world to it.  Monique and I would listen, then go to our local record stores to find albums by bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, etc.  Monique became a huge fan of Janis Joplin.  She even mostly gave up her love of Cher for Janis.

   Betty and Susan took their love of this new music a step further.  Even though they were only high school freshmen, they were getting rides into Hollywood and getting into the hot new clubs.  And getting backstage.  I remember talking to Betty during lunch and she told me about this one group she had spent the weekend with.  The lead singer was treating them like sex slaves.  Horribly degrading.  I had liked that band up to that point.  Never bought another recording by them again.

   Also during our freshman year, Monique met Brian.  He was a couple of years older than us.  I'll be talking more about him later.  He turned out to be Monique's first love.