A while ago, I did an internet search for my old girlfriend Sara Gedalecia online, and I only found one single reference to her, which was a vile, horrid webpage about the many victims of some serial killer bastard, maybe the famous Green River Killer, or the San Diego Slayer, or whoever, and they said that in 1987 she had been one of the many girls, mostly hookers and hitchhikers, that he murdered, and, well, Sara liked to hitchhike all the time.
It really, really bothered me that that was the only reference to that poor kid anywhere on the whole, entire internet, so I decided to write up this page, with a few pictures, too, so that someday, if maybe somebody else ever does an internet search for poor little Sara, that horrible page about her grisly death won't be the one and only thing they find! It's not perfect, sure, but it's better than that awful page that just mentions her having been murdered like that, right? I hope she would have liked it. I like to think so, anyway.
So, here's the story... Years and years and years ago, hanging around Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in Greenwich Village as a hippie kid in the early or mid 1960s, I knew a girl named Sara from Forest Hills, out in Queens, and I really loved her a lot. We were just silly teenagers then, maybe 15 years old, and she was one of my very first girlfriends.
It was so ridiculous, I had a crush on her, and we both hung out with a big crowd of high school kids then, so, gosh, it's so silly, I told someone that I liked her, and she told someone that she liked me, and that someone told someone else. and then that someone told someone else, and, eventually, just like two teenagers in love, we eventually hooked up and "went steady" as they say.
Sara was a very troubled girl, although I don't really think that the trouble was with her so much as it was with her mother, Edith, who was single because Sara's Dad had just walked out on the family one day, never to return, and Sara lived with her and a grey tabby cat named "Harry" in a little apartment out in the Queens, New York, neighborhood of "Forest Hills," which was way, way out on the E train, as I recall, although it might have been the F, it's been a while.
So, Sara and her Mom didn't get along at all, and, after an incident in which maybe Sara pushed her Mom, and maybe her Mom fell down, maybe into the bathtub, and maybe she broke something, her Mom got Sara into the grindhouse that is the New York City public health system's mental health division, and that was just disastrous. I mean, here's a perfectly nice girl, friendly, cute, and funny, who just cut school a little bit and maybe talked back to her Mom now and then, and smoked cigarettes after school, and the next thing you know, she's being committed to mental hospitals and wound up in a residential treatment center in upstate NY called Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, all for nothing, really, just 'cause her Mom couldn't cope with actually having to deal with this "difficult" child who refused to be "seen and not heard."
I remember one time, shortly after Sara got in trouble, a big bunch of her friends, including me, went up to visit her in a hospital room in the "psych ward" of some hospital on the upper east side somewhere. It was snowing, and this big bunch of us scruffy hippies just showed up at this hospital and, much to my surprise, they let us in to visit her, and she was SO very glad to see everyone, and she sat cross-legged on the bed in her hospital gown and I think we gave her cigarettes, and I remember that she told us that the windows in the room were unbreakable because she had found that out by throwing a clothes iron at the window and it had just bounced off. Shortly after that, I think, she got sent off to the Hawthorne Cedar Knolls residential treatment center for wayward kids that's around an hour north of NYC or so.
So, after Hawthorne, Sara and I dated for a while, and we made love... which was especially special because I was her first, and it was great, we couldn't keep our hands off of each other after that. I remember that she loved to smoke Kool brand cigarettes and would sit cross-legged on her bed, smiling and laughing and smoking Kools, and pulling apart her split ends, all the while listening to the latest records, especially the Rolling Stones, on one of those cheap portable record players everybody had back in the 1960s, which she really loved to do. I smoked Kools, too, as a direct result of her influence, primarily because whenever I would bum a cigarette from her it was a Kool, so I switched to Kools from Marlboros, and I continued to smoke them right up until I quit in 2003.
Sara was a huge "groupie," too, by which I mean that she was just a huge fan of rock music and bands and would go hang out in front of a band's hotel when they came to New York City hoping to meet them. One musician she met and actually struck up a friendship with was legendary psychedelic hippie folk singer, Donovan. I'm afraid I don't know all the details, but apparently, she met him somehow and, since he was in New York City for an extended period, maybe to do some recordings or something, and didn't know anyone in town at all, he invited her up to his hotel room and she brought along a bunch of friends and they all hung out and played music and sang songs and had fun. She and the gang hung out with him many times, and it always pissed me off that she never invited me to come, too, but, I was still really glad for her that she'd met, and hung out with, and was even friends with, a real-live rock star, because I knew how much it meant to her.
One time she brought me along with her to a recording session in a recording studio in midtown NYC with a band she knew and hung out with called Pure Prairie League, while they were recording their big hit song, Amie. They played it over, and over, and over, and over, about a thousand times, trying to get it exactly right, and now, I can't ever hear that song without thinking of poor Sara, and maybe shedding a tear or two for her, too.
So, then, like stupid teenage couples do, we broke up and lost touch with each other until years later, maybe 1972 or so, when I encountered her again when I moved into this huge apartment in a doorman building on West 100th Street and Riverside Drive, where she lived with her then boyfriend, a really handsome kid named Johnny D., who I think was a Hawthorne kid, too, and his other roommate, Fred L., who later went on to become the bass player for the punk band, Television, under the name of Fred Smith.
So, I moved into this apartment with all of these folks and it was cool, although Sarah now had a prescription drug problem and was always making the rounds of dentists, with real or imagined toothaches and dental problems trying to convince these dentists to prescribe codeine for her, which most of them did, because she was so cute and sweet and charming and innocent-looking, and she took a lot of it, too, she really got hooked on the pain pills, or "opioids" as they call them nowadays.
Her boyfriend, Johnny D., had a major drinking problem, and, in fact, that's how he and I met, we both worked dead-end jobs at a market research firm in midtown called Commercial Analysts, that was a haven for hippie misfits and out-of-work actors in need of a paycheck, where Sara had worked first and gotten us both in. He and I used to buy hip-flask-sized pints of cheap bourbon, like Old Grand-Dad, and we would drink them out on the fire escape at this job and then go back in, totally soused, and go back to work, and then, when an empty room opened up in that apartment where he lived with Sara, he offered it to me, and I took him up on it and moved in.
At some point Sara was told by some doctor or other that she had some kind of a mild form of epilepsy, and although I never believed it, I'm told it was, in fact, true, and, anyway, that was sort of the end of her life right there, like she just gave up even trying after that, thinking that, well, no matter what she did, she had that epilepsy, so, what was the point of even trying, right?
Sara moved out to Los Angeles at some point, and I visited her out there one time, although I can't remember if it was before or after the West 100th St. apartment, with my then girlfriend, Jane R., who later went on to be a big-shot producer on Sex And The City and other hit TV shows, like Castle. We stayed with Sara and her mullet-haircut boyfriend, who might have been named Davey, in a dumpy little apartment out in Burbank, and we went out with them to do what they did all the time, which was hang out at the local bowling alley and shoot pool.
I remember we made dinner with them one time, too, and that's when I had Hamburger Helper for the first time in my life. At some point while we were staying with them, Davey took a bath and had Sara wash his mullet haircut and through the bathroom door we could hear him whining, "Sara, my eyes! My eyes!" because she must have gotten shampoo in them. Oh, how we laughed, and for years later all one of us had to do was say, "Sara, my eyes! My eyes!" in a whiny voice, and we'd crack up all over again!
After that I never saw Sara again because she stayed out on the west coast, although I would occasionally hear bits and pieces about her through the grapevine, as it were, like I heard that she had had a kid, maybe two, and other little bits and pieces of news from time to time. Then, one day, I ran into her old high school friend Berta on a crosstown bus, who told me that Sara's body had been found out in the desert where she had been murdered. Wow!
Anyway, some time later, they made a made-for-TV movie about the hunt for, and capture of, the Green River Killer, but I just couldn't bring myself to watch it. Years later, just out of curiosity, I went out to Queens, to the building she used to live in, in Forest Hills, but her Mom had moved out (and, I later found out, had passed away in 2001), and the building superintendant I spoke to had never even heard of them, so that was the end of that.
It's a shame, really, I honestly believe that Sara was just a good kid who got a bum rap and a lot of bad breaks and went straight downhill from there. I believe that her Mom was not a bad person, just maybe kind of lazy with regard to dealing with a slightly "difficult" daughter, and, well, like a lot of parents at the time, (including mine, who had me committed to the Jewish Board Residential Treatment Center For Boys on St. Mark's Place in NYC), she was fooled by the Public Health system into thinking that there might be some help and succor to be found for her kid there, but there wasn't, it was exactly the opposite, it was the beginning of the end for that poor, sweet girl.
And that's the story of Sara Gedalecia. Well, as I knew her, anyway. Rest in peace, you poor sweet kid, rest in peace...
UPDATE: As a result of this very webpage, I'm now told, by Sara's old friend, Rhonda M., that: "Sara's ashes rest upstate in Woodstock, NY, with her old friend, Laurie B. I'm glad she's with someone who loved her unconditionally, and I hope she's at peace. Laurie is a psychic... and she believes Sara's spirit may have already returned in one of her own daughters!"
UPDATE 2: I just this minute remembered that I gave Sara her first tattoo! Years and years and years ago, I did a home-made tattoo of an Egyptian "ankh" symbol on my left hand between my thumb and first finger, and Sara liked it so much that she wanted one, too, so I did one on her hand, too, and we had matching tattoos. Awww, is that cute, or what? Sadly, I'm told that when poor Sara's body was found in the desert, the only way that they identified her was by the "No Regrets" tattoo she had. Kind of ironic, really, because I think she actually had lots of regrets.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you wake in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush,
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
[Mary Elizabeth Frye - 1932]
