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.
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