Molly was my father's first long term 'girlfriend' after Madukes moved out of our apartment at 1314 Fulton Street in San Francisco...Perhaps because she was so young, and artistic, and wild and insane and nurturing and exposed...did I love her so much. She actually was my big sister. Hmm. She was a perfect 5 foot 100 lb specimen. By perfect I mean tortured, alcoholic, detrimentally honest, verbose. Yes - perfect. I used to paint tennis shoes and faces on t-shirts with her. She had that box of 100+ Pentel colored markers. She ate Hawaiian bread mostly and was a bartender in Union Square, before the commercial bullshit took over. She wore tight Levis and leather jackets. Her hair was a cascade of dirty blonde waves. She cackled. She cut it up. She had transparent, knobby hands and fingers; funny fingernails...She offered me sips of Moosehead...She wore rings on her thumbs...One painfully memorable New Year's Eve wherein my Father steamrolled over to her house late at night, she put me to bed, sobering up as necessary in the presence of a 10 year old...And this winter, while visiting Pop in England, he recounted a beautiful story that took place that one summer he decided to bail out on life over to Barcelona/Morocco in the vain pursuit of a very vain woman...La Petite Molly emerges from that story as a champion...a lioness...a confident marvel of a now grown woman who was moved to leave one continent for another at the drop of a hat to essentially say just three things...after all, delivering the message in person...planting your feet in front of someone...on a train...bound for Paris...that trip propelled her into the stuff of novels!....maybe it marked the end, or the beginning...it's all the same sometimes...Anyway, as their relationship dissolved, so did ours. I wrote her 15 years later from college, maybe my junior year...2002? She had moved to North Carolina and was trying to progress from the bar to the kitchen. I never heard from her. Her last name is Fitzgibbon...The Monkey.
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