Sometime
before the end of eighth grade, I was befriended by two girls in my
school. Peggy was a brunette whose family hadn’t been living in
Vernon very long, and Jerry Jean was a blonde whose family lived on a
farm
just outside of town. Peggy’s parents had money – new,
conspicuous
consumption-type money. They had 2 cars, a new house, and a big
color TV. Jerry’s family didn’t have much of anything.
What Peggy and Jerry had in common was that neither of them was popular
in school and they both attended the First Baptist Church.
They talked me into coming to church with them for the big Revival,
complete with a famous guest preacher, a man I’d
never heard of before, from out of town. I declined their first
invitation, because my family weren’t Baptists. Although Mama had
taken me to church only on Easter, her family were Methodists and I
hadn’t been taught any tolerant or charitable view of other
denominations.
To Mama, Baptists were dunkers and only slightly better than Catholic
sprinklers. In her bigotry, my mother was as inconsistent as she
was in some other areas of her philosophy. It was her practice
all through my childhood, on Christmas Eve after tucking me into bed,
to go to Midnight Mass at the biggest Catholic Church in town.
She enjoyed the show, she said.
Later Mama had driven past the First Baptist Church (above) with me and
seen the huge banner stretched above the doors, advertising the Revival
Week, to be followed on Sunday by a free buffet lunch. She said
that would probably be a good show. The next time Peggy and Jerry
brought it up, I said I’d go with them on Sunday.
The out-of-town preacher had big hair and was a fast-talking, loud, fire-and-brimstone
preacher. He pranced and strutted back and forth across the podium, slinging his microphone cord out of his way — a microphone he hardly needed as his booming voice carried beyond the brick walls of the sanctuary and drew squeals of feedback from the speakers.
The congregation was primed from his very first words,
after a week of his sermons, to break out in hal-lay-LOO-yas and loud,
long, drawn out hand-waving AMENs. Even before they passed the
offering baskets and started playing Just As I Am
for the altar call, three people had jumped up and started speaking in
tongues and a few others had fallen into the aisles, jerking and
twitching, “slain in the spirit.”
As empathetic then as now, and a lot more gullible and impressionable, I found myself standing with six or ten
other people at the altar rail, taking Jesus as my personal savior. The
following Sunday, Mama, our landlady Marie, Mama’s boyfriend Bill, and
his old maid sister Bee, came to church to see me baptized with the
rest of the sheep that had been gathered in by that famous guy with big
hair, Billy something-or-other, or Jimmy Jeff, or Lonnie Lee….
I started going to Sunday school before the regular services and coming
back to church after dinner for the youth services on Sunday
evenings. Wednesday evenings Peggy, Jerry Jean and I all
went directly from school to the church for choir practice and
fellowship. Someone gave me a bible with a zippered white leather
cover and I proudly carried it to church with me, marking passages with the little colored bible-verse cards the Sunday School teacher handed out.
My relationship to God changed as I became indoctrinated. The
Southern Baptist God wasn’t the same one my father had led me to talk
to and turn to for guidance when I was very small, and from whom I had been drifting away since Daddy’s death. He was stern,
jealous, powerful and scary. He didn’t want us to dance, wear makeup or get
our ears pierced. Our bodies weren’t ours; they were his temples. If masturbation hadn’t been unmentionable, it would have been forbidden, too, I’m sure.
He was a micro-manager who was responsible for everything that
happened. It didn’t matter what we did, the only power in the
world that had any effect was God’s Will. God had taken my father
for his own unfathomable reasons. That idea had some appeal for
me, letting me off the hook for killing him. Instead of hating
myself, with the help of my Sunday school teacher and the preacher, I
started blaming God.
That sorta turned me off from going to church, and by the time Mama and
I got back from our California trip that summer and I started ninth grade, my church
attendance was irregular and infrequent. I read the bible though,
read it cover to cover that fall of ninth grade. I would read a few chapters or a book or two each night
in bed before I went to sleep. I looked up any words I didn’t
know in the old second-hand copy of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
I’d traded for at the used book store. When I finished the bible, I
started reading the dictionary through from a to z, a few pages a
night. That’s one of my most enduring memories from my ninth
grade year: reading the bible and the dictionary. It felt
somehow… important, or significant.
A week or two after the start of school in ninth grade, on my
thirteenth birthday, they held cheerleader tryouts. In Halstead,
I’d been part of the Pep Squad. We’d dress in our school colors,
pile onto a school bus with the basketball team and go to away games to
support our team by adding our voices to those of the
cheerleaders. It had been fun, but Vernon didn’t have a pep
squad. I decided to try out for cheerleading. It was a lost
cause from the start. I didn’t have the agility, strength or
stamina, didn’t know any of the standard cheers, and wasn’t popular –
in other words, I lacked all the requirements to be a
cheerleader.
Sitting on the bleachers with Peggy and Jerry, waiting our turns to try
out (none of the three of us made the squad), I mentioned it was my birthday, and I gushed proudly in a voice that carried to a few
dozen people sitting around us, “Thirteen…finally, I’m a
teenager!” Peggy gasped, Jerry turned to me and gaped, and a
couple of dozen heads turned our way with expressions ranging from
puzzlement to contempt. Me and my big mouth. When Peggy
recovered her composure, she said she had assumed that I was her age,
which was fifteen. Jerry, who was shorter, flatter-chested and
not nearly as psychologically mature as I, and about a year and a half
older, just couldn’t believe it. I was still trying to explain
about starting school when I was four because my birthday was in
September, and then skipping from second to third grade mid-year, when
I was called for my tryout. My discomfiture might have
contributed to my failure, but I don’t suppose I had a chance of
winning anyhow.
Another vivid memory from that time is my favorite after school
snack. I’d take a custard cup from the cupboard, put a big dollop
of Marshmallow Creme in it, pour an even bigger dollop of Hershey’s
chocolate syrup over that, peel a banana and dip the banana in the
brown and white goo. Mama wasn’t always there when I got home
from school, having taken a better paying waitress job when we returned
to Texas, instead of going back to work in the school cafeteria.
If it was here day off and she was there, I’d have to content myself with the banana.
After I’d gone through a few jars of MC and cans of Hershey’s in a
short time, she caught on to what I was doing and stopped buying
them. Since I was a toddler, she and I had been in conflict over
my sugar addiction, and I made her my unwilling enabler at every
opportunity.
Bill and Mama took off somewhere for a weekend and “got married.”
Maybe they did tie the knot legally, but as with most if not all of the
other men with whom she lived and whose names she used, there was no
legal formality of a divorce from the previous one before she and Bill
got hitched, and no divorce (as far as I know) from Bill when she took
off with Grady a few years later. Whether she was practicing bigamy, or just cohabitating and doing the politically correct thing of taking her “husband’s” name, I don’t know. In the course of my life, I have done both of those things before I matured enough to just cohabitate openly, and the last two times I was married, I kept my father’s name.
When Mama and I had returned to Vernon from California, the three-room
apartment in the front half of the second floor of the building where
Bill and Bee lived was vacant. It shared a bathroom with Bill and
Bee’s two-room apartment. We moved in and rearranged things so
that my bedroom was where Bill and Bee’s living-and-sleeping room had
been, Bee’s bed went into the kitchen of that apartment, and Bill and
Mama took the bedroom in the front apartment. It had a big living
room overlooking the tree-shaded lawns along Pease Street, between
Eagle and Pearl.
There is one vivid memory from that time that I can date
precisely. On October 4, 1957, I was walking my little dog Button
along Pease Street and listening to the beep-beep-beep from Sputnik on
my transistor radio. Button saw some movement on the lawn we were
passing, and lurched to the end of her leash, stuck her snoot under the
rear end of a big toad, and flipped it onto its back. I pulled
her back and watched as the toad squirmed and wobbled back onto its feet
and hopped into a hedge. I had never seen Button do that before,
but she must have enjoyed the experience because after that she repeated it every
time she could get her nose under a toad. Her muzzle grew an ugly
crop of rough gray warts, disproving that old wives’ tale that claims
you can’t get warts from a toad.
It was a short walk down Pease Street and across Main to the used book
store on Fannin or Deaf Smith Street (I forget which). There I
could buy a used paperback for a quarter or trade three books for
one. I had been an avid sci-fi fan ever since I’d read Isaac
Asimov’s I, Robot while we had the sundries store in Halstead. Sci-fi was the only fiction I was reading around that time in my life.
At the time and onward for many
years into my adulthood, I didn’t realize just how influential those authors had been on me and how
profoundly they had affected my paradigm. I was educated and
indoctrinated by Robert A. Heinlein; Philip K. Dick (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”); Arthur C. Clarke (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”); Fredric Brown (“Don’t ever sell mankind short by saying there’s anything they can’t do.“);
by Zenna Henderson who wrote about The People, a clan of telepathic,
telekinetic ETs who had been stranded on this planet, and with whom I
have always felt I would fit right in; and by many other great sci-fi
writers from the golden age of that genre.
I had been anemic from infancy, taking vitamins and being forced to eat
and drink all sorts of supposedly healthful things, both natural and synthetic. In Vernon, my mother took me to a doctor whose
office was on the fourth floor of a professional building
downtown. Twice a week, we would go there after school and he
would give me a shot of vitamin B-12. When that stream of bright
red vitamin juice hit my brain, I would feel a tremendous rush of
energy and well-being. Then, a few minutes later, I’d be
ravenously hungry. After the first few experiences, Mama and I
made sure that the shot was the last thing done before we left the
doctor’s office. We’d hurry out, get into the elevator, zoom down
four floors, jay-walk across to the diner on the other side of the
street, and order cheeseburgers. No food has ever tasted better than
those cheeseburgers, before or since.
No longer running the dishwasher and getting free lunches, I talked
Mama into giving me an allowance to buy lunch at a small store where
most of my friends hung out, instead of buying lunch tickets at
school. My fifty cents a day would buy me a burger, potato chips
and a Coke, but I usually just had chips and the Coke and put the other
quarter in the jukebox. It was there in Cooper’s store that I
discovered I could make boys turn and look at me if I stared at the
back of their heads. I suppose it would have worked with girls,
too. I never tried that.
There was one incident at Cooper’s store that got me noticed and talked
about by people who’d previously ignored my existence.
It all happened very quickly and was
over in a moment. Peggy had a new boyfriend who had
previously been dating another girl (I think her name was Carolyn) who
was one of the richest and most popular girls in school. Peggy,
Jerry and I were sitting at a table in the middle of the big room where
the jukebox was when Carolyn came in and saw us there. She
stalked through the crowd in a pair of tight white pants and a pink
angora sweater. She stood looming over Peggy, and started calling
her names because Peggy had taken her boyfriend away from her.
Carolyn’s arms were waving around in broad, threatening gestures, and
everyone was looking our way.
Peggy cringed and started to cry. She looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to
run or just slip under the table. Without giving it more than a
fleeting thought, I reached out toward Peggy and the back of my hand
just brushed Jerry’s bottle of orange pop, splashing it all over the
crotch of Carolyn’s white pants. Her harangue cut off in
mid-syllable and she started to sputter as she looked down and watched
the orange pop dribbling down her legs onto her shoes. As
everyone, including Peggy, began to laugh, Carolyn started crying and
ran out of the store. After that, kids tended to be more polite toward me, and even
deferential in some cases, but still not friendly. That would have been too much for an outsider to expect.
Several of the boys that Peggy and Jerry knew had their own cars. Friday and
Saturday nights, what all the teens did was “drag Wilbarger,” driving
from one end of town to the other on the highway that ran through between
Wichita Falls and Amarillo. The cars kids drove weren’t a reliable
gauge of whose families had more money, because some of the poor kids
had jobs and/or put a lot of work into their hot rods. The best
way to tell who had the money and who didn’t was to watch the exhaust
pipes and listen to the sound of the engines as they took off from a
stop.
The kids with money bought their gas at the filling stations, and the
kids without money burned “drip” in their cars. Drip was obtained
late on moonlit nights by turning off the headlights, surreptitiously
trespassing in the oil fields and dipping up the stuff that collected
under heavy hinged iron covers in concrete-lined condensation
pits. It was filtered through an old felt cowboy hat kept in the
trunk for that purpose, before being poured into the gas tank.
Water and other impurities in the drip gas affected the cars’
performance. The cars burning drip were the ones that sputtered, backfired, lurched on takeoff, and shot sparks out the tail pipes.
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