April 1, 2006

• late fifties, north Texas low-rent romance

  In the summer of ’57, when Mama and I first got back to Vernon,
  Texas from the California trip, we moved into a little wood frame
  house with a porch across the entire front of it, on Mansard street near Pine.  It was the last
  place that she and I shared alone (except for Button, my little black
  dog) until she moved in with me in Wichita, Kansas when I was nineteen.

  There was a rocking chair on the porch and we spent some long evenings
  there, escaping from the indoor heat, Mama in the rocker and me
  sitting on the steps.  I remember pointing out parked and passing
  cars, trying to identify them: ” ’53 Caddy, ’56 Chevy… that’s a
  Studebaker.  Mama, what year is that one?” 

  She had told me
  that boys would be more interested in me if I took an interest in
  their interests.  My skill at pattern recognition earned me
  some notice and approval for my ability to identify the various
  makes and models of cars, and then later, of aircraft.  I’ve
  forgotten much of that now, and since I gave up the game of
  learning new ones decades ago, now I’d only get a chance to see those old
  cars at classic rallys, shows, and in museums.  It would do little good to be able to
  remember.  Why waste neural pathways on such nonsense?

  A
  couple of times that summer, the city’s tanker truck cruised slowly
  through the neighborhood on its rounds, spraying a fog of DDT to kill
  the mosquitoes.  Recalling that makes my skin crawl.  Some
  more pleasant memories involve the TV shows Mama and I watched together.  I liked What’s My Line, To Tell the Truth, Mr.
  Peepers, Our Miss Brooks, Dobie Gillis, and of course, I Love Lucy.
    The popularity of Gunsmoke
  had spawned a big crop of other westerns:  Wagon Train, Cheyenne,
  Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel (Mama’s favorite) and Sugarfoot, my
  favorite because Will Hutchins was so cute.  I loved his voice,
  too.

  One of our neighbors there was Dolores, a young woman a year ahead of
  me in school.  That would make her about sixteen at the time I
  knew her.  We had lots of good times together for a few weeks that
  summer.  We walked for miles every day and she showed me parts of
  town I wouldn’t otherwise have known were there:  tree-shaded
  creek banks and pastures at the edge of town with big clumps of prickly
  pear that reminded me of the landscape around Halstead, Kansas.

  Sometimes we went to my house for lunches of mayonnaise on Wonder
  Bread, and sometime I’d wait on her front porch for her to bring out sandwiches of mustard on Wonder Bread, because her mother didn’t allow anyone else into their house while she was gone.

  Dolores
  had clear and flawless brown skin, beautiful thick black wavy hair down
  past her shoulders, and a laugh like bells ringing.  I wore jeans
  most of the time, but Dolores wasn’t allowed to wear pants.  She
  always wore full skirts with several petticoats under them.  Crinoline petticoats were in, for the first time since the mid-1800′s.  Their visual effect was entirely different with our knee-length skirts than they had been with long dresses back around the Civil War, but they still interfered with movement and occasionally flipped up to display our underwear.

  There was an innocence to Dolores that wasn’t there for me and my other
  friends.  Our conversations were about science, nature, politics, current
  events and all the things that engaged our curiosity, but not about boys, who were the favorite topic of my other friends Peggy and Jerry Jean.  Dolores always
  had to be home before her mother got back from work, and couldn’t leave
  the house each day until she had finished her chores.  Unlike me,
  she would never have considered breaking those rules.

  Mama liked Dolores and was glad I had found a friend, until the people
  Mama worked for learned about it and told my mother that she shouldn’t
  let me associate with “that kind of people.”  Mama said that
  Dolores had a “bad reputation” and that I’d get one if I was her
  friend, so I couldn’t be Dolores’s friend any more.  I know
  Dolores was of Mexican descent, and Catholic.  That would probably
  have been enough, in Vernon at that time, to make white Baptists
  consider her to be inferior, but she was also illegitimate.  That
  clinched it.

  If I haven’t yet conveyed the fact that I was boy crazy, obsessed with
  the male of the species, and only the young ones, let me correct that
  oversight right now.  I had my first date in Vernon that summer,
  after having spent the latter portion of the previous school term
  dateless except for a couple of unpaired group excursions dragging
  Wilbarger with Peggy, Jerry Jean and friends.

  Mama and I were shopping for groceries at the new Giant store, and I
  was stealing glances, trying not to stare at the tall muscular kid
  bagging our stuff as we went through the checkout.  He was cute, I recall, but I can’t really picture his face now.  His hair was
  brown, his hands and general build were big, and he smelled…
  masculine.  I have always loved the pheromonal hit from male
  sweat.  As he was putting the bags of groceries in our car for us,
  he turned to Mama and said in an Ozark drawl, “Howdy.  My name is
  Glenn, Glenn O’Neill.  My family just moved to Vernon.  Would
  you mind if I take your daughter to a movie some time, providing she’d
  like to go with me?”

  I know I must have blushed.  I blushed just now, remembering it.  
  Blushing has always been one of the things I do best, whether I want to
  or not.  I even taught myself to do it on cue, but have never learned how to suppress it.  I looked at Mama and kept quiet, working
  hard to restrain myself from tugging at Mama’s skirt and begging,
  “Please, please, Mama, let me go to a movie with this guy!  Just
  let me get close to him in the dark, pleeeez….”  She said she’d
  think about it, but she wanted to meet his parents first.

  They exchanged phone numbers, he told her his mother worked at Christ
  the King Hospital and what time she’d be home that evening.  The
  two mothers arranged a time for a meeting, and Mama and I went to the
  address Mrs.O’Neill gave her for our get-acquainted meeting.  It
  was a tiny, unpainted place of silvery weathered wood in an alley
  behind their landlord’s house, a converted “garage” or probably stable
  and carriage house like the first hovel Mama and I inhabited in that
  town, about double the size that little chicken coop of ours. 
  When we stepped into their kitchen door,  I recall thinking that
  here was someone even poorer than we were.

  Glenn’s father, Earl (really Gardus, one of three siblings, with a
  brother named Grady and a sister named Gladys) was tall and cadaverous
  with a mad crooked grin and eyes that glittered in a wild way it’s hard
  to describe.  I was to learn later that he was on the lam from
  Arkansas and their name wasn’t O’Neill, but O’Neal.  I never knew
  what crime he was wanted for.  That’s the sort of information that
  if it isn’t volunteered, you just don’t ask.  My best guess was that it was fairly serious and maybe violent.

  Glenn’s mother Marie was friendly and gregarious, short and
  stout, and wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a single thick braid wound
  around her head.  When she would let it down, it reached her ankles.  She was to become one of my mother’s closest
  friends.  The other person who shared those two small rooms was
  Sarah, Glenn’s sister, a year or two younger than I.  I wonder why
  I can see Sarah and her mother and father when I close my eyes, but not
  Glenn.  It is his scent that comes back to me when I remember him.

  Glenn’s mother worked in the hospital laundry, on her feet all day in
  heat and hurry, as my mother was in her waitress job.  They hit it
  off immediately. The dO’Neills didn’t have a car, so Mama would take Marie
  shopping or pick up Sarah if she needed a ride somewhere.  Sarah
  and I started seeing each other a lot, wandering around Vernon during
  the long summer days while our mothers and her brother were at work and
  her father was at home, making himself scarce.

  Glenn
  and I had our movie date, and a succession of others, at the Plaza
  Theater, which is apparently still standing, though vacant and
  currently for sale according to what I learned on the net.  It is
  even, by some people (the sellers, perhaps?), considered a “historic”
  building.

  Tall and strong, Glenn liked to pick me up in big bear hugs and spin
  around with me so that my feet flew out.  He squeezed me so hard
  one time that it separated the cartilage between my ribs and
  breastbone.  I think it hurt him more than it did me, and he
  caught a lot of hell from his parents over it. 

  He was amazed and
  intrigued that he could place his hands around my waist (about seventeen
  inches at the time), and his thumbs and fingertips would meet.  I
  remember him grasping me that way, lifting me overhead, and whooping in
  a loud rebel yell.

  When school started, Glenn attended for a month or two, during which we
  often left the school grounds at lunchtime and went to his place to
  kiss and fondle and carry on about as sexily as two people can with all
  their clothes buttoned up.  Sometimes, we’d lose track of time and
  not make it back to school at all on those afternoons.  I got in
  some trouble for playing hooky.  I was continually intoxicated on
  the dopamine and whatever else was in that hormonal soup we generated
  by rubbing our bodies together.

  For my thirteenth birthday, Glenn
  gave me a gold plated swizzle stick shaped like a golf club, a real WTF
  present.  Odd, the things I remember.

  There was more to our relationship than the private physical
  activity.  When our parents were present, or on the walks to and
  from school, we talked.  Glenn shared my interest in sci-fi and
  was intrigued with the ideas of space flight, orbital elevators, and
  particle-beam weapons.  I would cheerfully have talked about more
  personal topics, but he was apparently less sexually-obsessed than I
  was.  I had shifted from wondering how long I was going to remain
  a virgin to eagerly and actively looking forward to getting my cherry
  popped.  Do people under the age of fifty still use that
  unpleasant euphemism?  Back then, the archaism “deflowering” was
  still in currency amongst our elders.

  When Glenn turned sixteen and could legally quit school, he did. 
  He got a full-time job with a roofing company, and then a better paying
  oil field job out of town.   We had never made any future
  plans together, and by the time he left I was dating other boys. 
  It wasn’t a painful parting at all.  We kept in contact through
  our parents, and I learned a year or two later that he had joined the
  Marine Corps.  He became my cousin by marriage after my mother
  left town with his uncle Grady, and I’d see him once more when he
  visited us after I went to live with Mama and Grady in Southern
  California in 1960.

  I started going steady with Eddie Duncan during ninth grade.  He
  had a car and was friends with the boy my friend Peggy was going with,
  Alford Sparks.  We double-dated sometimes, dragging Wilbarger or
  going to a drive-in movie.  The only specific movie I recall from
  that time was Dr. No, with Sean Connery as James Bond.  I don’t
  recall seeing much of it, because I was too busy necking, but I do remember the
  music and some of the dialogue.

  Texas’s alcoholic beverage control laws vary from county to
  county.  Wilbarger county was dry, no alcohol sold (legally) at
  all.  We were about fifteen miles south of the Oklahoma line,
  where we could buy beer with 3.2% alcohol content (by “we” I mean older
  kids or those with fake ID), and by driving a little farther, into the
  next county east toward Wichita Falls, we could get 6% beer.  But
  for those in the in crowd, there was something better and much
  closer.  On the edge of town, down a long country lane posted with
  “no trespassing” and “tresspassers will be shot” signs, if the man knew
  you, he’d sell you hard cherry cider for $5.00 a quart.  Now I’m
  salivating.

  Eddie and I went out in his car every weekend on Friday or Saturday
  night.  At least, we had a date to go out every weekend.  It was an unwritten rule:  if you were going steady you
  went out every weekend.  We had a standing date, but a few
  times Eddie stood me up.  Ooooh, I hated that!  I’d get all
  tense with anxiety, keep watching the clock, pacing the floor, walking
  out in the front yard and looking down the street watching for his
  car… aargh.

  I’d be ready to call his house after a few minutes to ask if he had forgotten me, but Mama always made me wait at least an hour, a whole agonizing hour of pacing and looking down the street.  When I did call, his sister would say he wasn’t there.  Each time, his excuse was the same.  He’d been
  with one or another of his friends, working on someone’s car, sometimes
  his own car.  He hadn’t thought to phone me.  Sheesh.  But I
  forgave him.  What were my options?  Break up with him and
  start looking for another date?  I never even considered it. 
  “Putting up with” was preferable to “doing without.”

  I was supposed to be home from those dates by ten, but sometimes we’d
  lose track of time and miss my curfew.  The places we parked
  varied according to where other kids were parked at the time and where we could find a secluded spot. 
  That was another unwritten rule:  we didn’t congregate. 

  Southwest of
  Vernon, along a creek, there was a regular lovers’ lane with a number
  of secluded parking spots scattered among the live oaks.  In and
  around town were several other places where the only traffic was people
  looking for a place to park.  One of these was behind the
  bleachers at the football field.  That’s where we were the night
  that Mama came looking for us when I wasn’t home on time.  It was
  about 1 AM, she was livid and I was astounded that it was that
  late.  Time flies when you’re having fun.  She grounded me,
  but I talked her out of it.  I could always wear her down on rules
  and shit like that.

  Mama
  and Bill had gotten married (I guess, maybe) and we had moved into the
  expanded apartment in Bill and Bee’s building, when, in March of
  ’58  the school had a formal awards banquet and dance.  Mama
  and I went to Wichita Falls to shop for a formal.  It took us an
  entire exhausting Saturday on sidewalks from one shop to another, in and
  out of fitting rooms.  There was a strictly limited amount of
  money available to spend, and Mama had strict ideas about what was
  appropriate to wear.

  She wouldn’t approve, or couldn’t afford, any of the dresses I
  wanted.  I wanted floor length.  She demanded street
  length.  I wanted strapless.  That was out of the question
  for her.  I wanted white, pink, or black.  White showed
  stains too easily, she said; redheads just don’t wear pink; black was
  “too old for me.”  She liked stiff, rustling organza, and I wanted
  soft satin or velvet, or at least crepe de chine.

  
  Mama picked my dress over my objections and I hated it.  The shoes
  were hand-me-downs from her boss’s daughter who had gone away to
  college.  The nylon stockings had seams in back , opaque reinforced toes that showed in my sandals (I had wanted seamless sheers, of course), and were held up by a white garter belt. 

  Mama even bought my corsage, from a florist who was one
  of her regular customers, after a consultation with Eddie’s
  mother.  Our landlady wanted to take a picture of me in my “pretty
  dress” before I left for the dance.  Or maybe she wanted to get a
  picture of her new color TV and her grandson’s portrait.  She
  didn’t even get all of my dress in the shot.

  I do remember a little bit about the banquet:  a darkened room,
  candles in glass chimneys and flowers on the tables, crepe paper
  streamers in school colors strung up under the ceiling, forgettable food; jocks and
  cheerleaders getting applause and letter sweaters and jackets.   Some kids danced.  I
  don’t remember dancing.  Eddie didn’t dance… Southern Baptist,
  y’know.

  Around the end of school that year, Eddie and I broke up. 
  His family’s house had burned down and that was the excuse with which
  he let me down easy.  He stammered and wouldn’t make eye contact
  as he said something about his folks needing him at home.
  

  • 3:09 pm
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