February 15, 2006

• 1956: Stuck on Second Base

  It has been months since I’ve had much of an urge to pursue my
  memoirs.  Going back to the dangling end of the adolescence
  thread, I discovered that I ended the Going Steady episode with a cliffhanger.  That was rude, I know.  Sarah
  asked for more at the time, and there may have been one or two of the
  rest of you who were left hanging, wondering what happened next in my
  relationship with Larry.

  I saw him a few more times at school before he, his mother Dolly, and
  his brother Perry moved out of our neighborhood.  There were a
  few phone calls after that, but very soon after the move that took him
  out of Hamilton Jr. High, his family moved farther away, out of state,
  and I didn’t hear from him again until I was seventeen, married and
  separated from my first husband, with a two-year-old daughter.  The story of our reunion, written for our daughter
  (who had tracked me down after growing up in an adoptive family, and
  wanted to know her birth-family history), was the beginning of my
  memoirs here.  That can be found at the start of the “story of the
  ‘sixties” links in the left module.

  Until late in 2005, there had been no developments in my relationship
  with Larry since the parting I described then.  For years, I would
  see a tall blond man and think of Larry.  A few times, I followed
  and approached one or another of them, only to discover it wasn’t
  him.  Life went on, but Larry stayed steadily in my
  thoughts.  When I came online I started searching for him and a
  few other people whose memories remained strong within me.

  I found my son Will, my Douglass cousins, and some old
  classmates.  Larry had a common name, and my searches returned
  many results.  I followed dozens of trails and none of them led to
  Larry, his mother, his brother, or any of the Wichita branch of his
  family I had known.  When I learned about Zabasearch last year, I
  started over.  I found a mailing address for Perry, Larry’s
  brother, and wrote to him.  After several months, I got a reply
  from him.  He told me that Larry had been killed in a car crash in
  Austin, Texas, “some years ago,” but he didn’t recall the date.

  ---

  This episode begins with one of those “other stories” I referred to in
  passing a couple of years ago when I skipped ahead in my story and told
  the Panhandle Christmas
  tale out of sequence.  Through circumstances I related in that
  entry, in the late summer between seventh and eighth grades and for the
  early months of eighth grade, in the time surrounding my twelfth
  birthday, I had unlimited free movie passes.

  I went to every Saturday matinee and to evening shows occasionally,
  usually on Friday nights.  The social life at the Saturday shows
  (not true matinees, but early morning kids-only Brer Fox Club shows, for
  which I had a membership card) was much like what later developed among
  teens at malls.  In the lobby and rest room before the show and at
  intermission, and in the theater while the lights were up, girls would
  congregate and talk about the boys. 

  When the lights went down, there would be some shuffling around in the
  seats and girls would pair off with boys for “necking” (kissing,
  handholding and/or arms around shoulders or necks, of which nobody
  seemed to disapprove) and “petting” (groping at breasts or genitals,
  which some boys didn’t do and which no girl would admit to doing whether she
  participated in it or not, for fear of getting a “bad reputation”).
   
  One very cute boy was pointed out to me as “Frenchy.”  I guess he
  was about two or three years older than I was, which would have put him
  in my
  grade or the one just ahead of me if he was in school.  None of
  the girls there knew him from school.  Nobody knew his name. 
  He was called Frenchy because
  he liked to French kiss, with tongue.  This was notable because
  most boys didn’t kiss at all and the ones who did usually puckered and
  pecked. 

  I think it was the very next Saturday after I had gotten the word about
  Frenchy, when he sat down beside me after the lights went down in the
  theater and put his arm around my shoulder.  I don’t know whether
  one of the girls told him I liked his looks, or whether I caught his
  eye, or maybe he just sampled all the new girls in the crowd. 
  That last surmise has some credence, considering that I came down with
  mononucleosis about that time and there was a lot of it going around.

  Frenchy and I started meeting every Saturday morning at the Brer Fox
  club, in “our place” by the windows upstairs, then we’d find seats at
  the back of the balcony and spend the next three hours or so sucking
  face.  [I love that term, which I first heard about a quarter century after these events occurred.]  I never saw Frenchy outside those Saturday movies.  His name was Roy Bear,
  and he lived in North Wichita about as far from where I lived as
  possible in that town.  We talked a little before the movies started and kissed a
  lot after the lights went down.  He must have had some expert instruction, or else he was
  naturally gifted.  He was an excellent kisser.  His soft,
  sweet, deep kisses curled my toes and made my panties damp. 

  He did also fondle my breasts, but not as ardently as Leroy Coy
  had.  He was much better at kissing than Leroy had been, however,
  and he seemed to appreciate my experience and passion.  During the
  weeks and months I was there, we always sought each other out as soon
  as we arrived and sat together exclusively.  I can only guess at
  the gossip about us that went on amongst the girls in the
  bathroom.  At the time, I didn’t even think about that. 
  Making that move out of the gaggle of girls into a couple with Frenchy
  seemed as natural as breathing.

  Frenchy wasn’t my “steady”, however.  The Saturday meetings with
  him didn’t seem to have any connection with the rest of my life. 
  The movie theater where the Brer Fox Club met was in North Wichita and
  I don’t recall ever seeing anyone from my school there.  I had a
  succession of dates to movies and FAD Club (Fun And Dance) dances with
  boys from my school, and one steady boyfriend during that time.

  Dating was just one of the troublesome issues between Mama and me
  around that time.  Clothing and cosmetics were a couple of
  others.  She had ideas about what was age-appropriate.  They
  differed markedly from mine, but I wore her down with my logic.  I
  pointed out that the other kids my age were a year or two behind me in
  school.   I made the honor roll about as often as not in junior
  high, and always scored above average.  I convinced Mama that
  since I was excelling over most of my classmates in school, it wasn’t
  fair for me not to be allowed to join them in social activities.

  She set curfews for me, insisted on driving my dates and me to the
  movies and dances and either picked us up afterward or, if she was
  going on a date that night, had us picked up by a cab for the ride
  home.  A few times before my twelfth birthday, I went to movies
  with guys who were fourteen or fifteen years old.  I had some
  internal conflict each of those times over whether to reveal to them
  that I was young enough to get in on a child’s ticket.  Imagining
  them being appalled to take a “little girl” on a date, and maybe
  turning right around and taking me home instead of to the movie, I kept
  my mouth shut and they paid the adult admission price for both of us.

  The clothes I wore were determined more by economy than fashion. 
  When poodle skirts were the latest thing – full circular felt skirts
  with wooly poodle appliques – I got a squirrel skirt with a real fur
  tail, because it was marked down as a closeout after all the poodles
  were sold.  I  had wanted a poodle skirt because “everyone
  had them,” but after wearing my squirrel a few times I was glad I had
  it.  It was classier:  black felt instead of the pink of the
  poodles.   Poodles went out of fashion as fast as they came
  in but my squirrel worked for me for several years, until his tail fell
  off.

  The only makeup Mama allowed me to wear was lipstick.  She had
  been allowing me to use Tangee “natural” lipstick, the kind she always used,
  for several years.  This was some odd-smelling translucent orange
  stuff that went on transparent and turned pink or red a minute or two
  after being applied.  Its color was apparently determined by
  individual body chemistry, because it looked different on me than it
  did on her.  It wore off quickly, leaving a colored outline
  behind. 

  In junior high, I talked my mother into letting me buy some coral-color
  lipstick that was advertised as “kiss-proof.”  It wasn’t, not at
  all.  It would end up smeared all over my face and that of the guy
  I was kissing.  I got into the habit of putting on lipstick before
  I left on a date because if I didn’t my mother would have been
  suspicious.  Then I’d clean it all off before I started kissing
  and try to remember to reapply it before I went home.

  Bill, the boy I went steady with that year, moved into Granny’s
  neighborhood during the summer while Mama and I had been on our trip to
  California.  We started dating that summer before Mama got the
  live-in job taking care of Mrs. Bull, the old lady who supplied all my
  movie passes.  When we moved in with Mrs. Bull, it took me out of
  the area for Hamilton, where Bill would be going to school, and put me
  into the newly-built Truesdell school.  Bill and I spent a lot of
  time on the phone, and had a standing movie date each Friday
  night. 

  In retrospect, I think that our being separated by that move
  intensified our feelings for each other.  Each Friday night that
  Mama let us ride home in a cab, Bill would be dropped off at his place
  in Granny’s neighborhood before the cab took me on home to Mrs.
  Bull’s.  We would cling to each other, hugging and kissing in the
  back of the cab, murmuring about how much we would miss each other
  until next week.  One night the cabbie told us, “Break it up,
  you’re fogging my windows!”

  Our summer romance continued up to Christmas and my trip with Mama to
  Texas to meet her Bill.  I was emotionally devastated to be
  leaving Frenchy and Bill.  I had been eagerly looking forward to
  my first opportunity to lose my virginity, and there I was, being
  parted from both of my best prospects, never having gotten past second
  base.
  

  • 9:55 pm
  • 8 Comments