August 20, 2002

• 1954-55

  In seventh
  grade, it was my first year in Wichita, Hamilton Jr. High, and I had
  made a friend in the neighborhood during the summer (that came out
  typoed as “simmer”, freudian typo for Kansas summers), Martha Lou
  Prilliman. I knew her name before I met her. Her mother called out,
  Maar-thee Loo-UU, almost yodeling at the end, several times a day, and
  the girl would scoot from her yard, or down the block, into the house.
  Then we met somehow, broke
  the ice and started spending about as much time together in her house
  as in mine or out in the neighborhood.

  Martha was nearly as new to the
  neighborhood as I was. Her father had just moved the family there where
  he was supervising a big construction job for Peter Kiewit. Our
  birthdays were just two days apart, but she was two years older, which
  put us in the same grade in school. We clicked. We watched American
  Bandstand and coached each other to get the steps right. We went to
  movies a lot because my mother was dating a projectionist and we had
  passes twice a week, Friday night and Saturday afternoon.

  The two of us made other friends after the
  school year started, and on the way home from school we would stop in at the drugstore
  soda fountain for Cokes, four or five of us squeezed into a booth. It
  was one of two drugstores a few blocks apart, this one at Broadway and Lincoln, the
  other on Harry and Osie, I think. Our clique’s homes were scattered in
  three directions from the Lincoln Street store (I wish I could recall
  it’s name.) Our friends would turn
  off to the east or continue south, and Martha and I would turn west,
  all of us sticking to the route our parents prescribed: “You come
  STRAIGHT home!”

  Sometime that school term someone came up
  with the idea of putting aspirin in Coke to get high. I think the idea
  came from TV or a movie, but it could have been simple word-of-mouth urban myth. My friends would all have cherry Cokes and I
  would have a vanilla Coke. I’ve started to salivate thinking of vanilla
  Coke–and it’s in the stores NOW! It was especially good with the added
  tang of acetyl salicylic acid, but the aspirin made it fizz up and
  overflow so I sometimes had sticky stuff on my elbows or where it
  dripped from the table onto my lap.

  From time to time for as long as Martha and
  I lived in the neighborhood, one or more of the Woods kids who lived up
  the block would taunt or jeer or threaten us or some other of the
  littler kids. They were a miserable, belligerent family headed by an
  alcoholic single father. The Woods boys, all 5 teen-to-young-adult brothers, were
  big boys, and their little sister Priscilla was a lot bigger than I
  was, and even a little bigger than Martha. She was a lot rougher and
  more mature-seeming, too. We were surprised when school started, to
  find her in seventh grade with us.

  Priscilla belonged to a bunch of tough
  girls who wore black leather jackets and gobs of inexpertly applied
  makeup. Some of her friends were in eighth or ninth grade. Maybe it had taken
  Priscilla more than the usual six years to get to seventh grade.

  One day someone said something or said that
  Martha said something and the outcome was a sidewalk shoving match,
  with Priscilla giving Martha repeated two-handed pushes in the chest.
  Martha gave ground gradually until I tackled Priscilla from the side.
  Well, it wasn’t a tackle, exactly… more like I fell on her, but it stopped the
  shoving match. Priscilla came up slugging, windmilling her fists at
  Martha. I grabbed her from behind in a bear hug and then an adult
  intervened, the owner of the drugstore.

  Next day, all three of us were in the
  principal’s office. He mapped out three separate routes to our
  respective homes and sent the maps to our parents. The rest of the
  school year, Priscilla and her girlthugs held court in their booth in
  OUR drugstore. My route took me past the other drug store, The Owl, but
  after my first Coke there, alone among a gaggle of cliques to which I didn’t belong, I just skipped the after-school Cokes
  and hurried home to watch Bandstand. Poor Martha’s route bypassed both
  of the neighborhood soda fountains, so she didn’t even have the option.
  We used to race sometimes, a slow, walking race because neither of us
  liked to run, along our separate routes, and watch Bandstand at the
  loser’s house.

  The Woods’s house was on a corner. My route
  kept me on the opposite side of one of the streets and Martha across
  the perpendicular street. Sometimes, striding down that penultimate
  block to the finish, maybe breaking into a brief sprint if the finish
  was close, we’d have two or three Woods brothers and maybe their Dad,
  jeering us on. Priscilla, of course, was doing the social thing at the
  soda shoppe. The “race” was ten city blocks for each of us, once a day
  because mornings we trudged half-asleep. Racing then would have been
  out of the question.  Martha had an advantage in length of stride,
  and she
  won more often

  The TV where we usually watched Bandstand
  was in an alcove off my aunt Alice’s (“Granny’s”) front room. It was filled with
  houseplants and around this time it was inhabited by my
  chameleon. When I got home, he would scamper as far out as he could on
  the closest plant to me and flash colors at me. He’d nose me if I stuck
  my nose out, and you know I did. Loved the feel of that cool little
  lizard nose on the tip of mine. And I can still dance the bop. I was
  bopping around here last night, briefly. Don’t even WANT to dance all
  night at this stage of my life, but I wouldn’t mind being ABLE to.

  • 12:55 pm
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