April 17, 2008

• Cheyenne, Wyoming, Summer, 1961

  This episode follows this one.

  My boss at the Owl Drive-In Restaurant was also the cook on the night shift, the shift I worked.  There was a big dining room inside, where they did most of their business.  The curb service lot would hold only about seven cars, and I was the only carhop on duty on my shift.  The only time I was ever there in the daytime was the afternoon that I was hired, so I don’t know what went on there during the day. 

  I was scared of my boss at first, not for any good reason, just because he was the boss, the man with the power, and he was a little abrupt in his manner and sharp in his speech.  The day he hired me, he told me what he expected:  speed, efficiency, accuracy and courtesy.  Orders had to be written in his code, no exceptions.   The abbreviations were simple, and mostly obvious, but there were a lot of them to learn.

  My first night there, I learned some of the more obscure points of the code by getting it wrong and being called back to the service window to make it right.  I guess my fear and embarrassment showed.  One of the waitresses caught me in a quiet moment and told me not to let the boss scare me, he was really a nice guy.  He was a retired sergeant, not long out of the U.S. Marine Corps, and that accounted for his roughshod approach.  When I got to know him, I really did like him.  I wish I could recall his name.

  I had a few slow weeknights to get used to the job before my first busy weekend.  Most of my customers were airmen from Warren Air Force Base.  The boss referred to them as flyboys, even to their faces.  They called him, “the jarhead,” but never to his face.  The guys flirted with me, and I wasn’t comfortable with it.  My instinctive response would have been to joke around with them, play the game, but I was married and thought that made a difference.  I guess my confusion and discomfort made me seem sorta stiff.  Some of them tried extra hard to get me to loosen up.

  That first Saturday night, right in the middle of the dinner rush when every table inside was occupied and every space at the curb was filled, I served an order to a flyboy, alone in his car, parked right outside the door.  He asked me, “Is that a wedding ring on your finger?”  I said yes and he said, “Let me see.”  I held my hand up, he grabbed it, put a handcuff around my wrist and snapped the other cuff around his own wrist, with the chain going through his car window, which was surrounded by a solid steel frame.

  I jumped back as soon as I saw what he was doing, and started yelling at him to let me go as I pulled on the cuffs.  He had opened his car door and was hanging on it, about halfway through the window, when my boss came storming down the steps waving a nightstick and screaming at the guy to unlock those cuffs.  The kid said he didn’t have a key.  My boss ordered him to climb the rest of the way through the car window, and he did.  We were headed into the building for my boss to call the cops, when another airman came up with a handcuff key and liberated me.

  I had orders waiting to be served, so I just went back to work.  The boss told the kid he was permanently eighty-sixed.  He jumped in his car and laid down rubber as he left.  I was flustered, and there was some kidding for a while, from customers and waitresses.  The boss went back to cooking, and said no more about it until closing time, when he handed me the $20 tip he had extorted from my captor for me.  He said he’d demanded $50, but the kid didn’t have that much.  After that, I wasn’t afraid of him any more.

  I loosened up and started joking with the guys who flirted with me.  Several of them asked me out and I turned them all down.  My tips improved as customers got to know me.  Some of the guys didn’t exactly flirt, but they showed what appeared to be real friendly interest in me.  As much as was feasible in the moments while I took orders, served food, and picked up trays afterward, we got acquainted.  I found out where they came from and gave them the parts of my history they asked about.

  Every night just before closing there was a mini-rush of guys who had just gotten off the swing shift at the base.  One night one of the friendly ones offered me a ride home.  I flashed the ring at him and said I was married.  He said he was, too.  His smile was sincere and his eyes were nice, and a cab would have cost me most of the tips I’d earned that night, so I said okay.

  We talked all the way to the Kinmans’ house that night, and he showed up again the next night to take me home. Within a week or so we had kissed and soon after that we started going out to a remote part of the base and steaming up his car windows until dawn.  I was seriously smitten with the man, and to all appearances the feeling was mutual.  We talked a lot, about all sorts of things, each time our breathing would return to normal.  He knew all about my abusive marriage and I knew about his shotgun bride who chose to live with her parents and raise their baby on the Air Force allotment.

  I don’t recall his name, either, and it doesn’t matter.  We’d been hot and heavy lovers for only about a week or so when Mrs. Kinman woke me early one morning and told me that Marie had woken crying in the night and kept her up until almost dawn and she couldn’t condone such immoral behavior as my staying out ’til dawn.  We had to get out.  She gave me 48 hours, “for the baby’s sake.”

  That night at work, I told my boss I had to quit.  He seemed sincerely sorry to see me go, and he was more than willing to pay me what I’d earned without waiting until the end of the regular pay period.  …period… oh, yeah!  I had been a little worried about pregnancy, but on the morning I put all my stuff in a cab and took it to the bus depot, my period started.  I went to a nearby drugstore for pads, then, for economy and convenience decided to try something my mother had always frowned upon:  tampons.  Never wore pads again, except for minis for a little extra protection.

  I don’t think I even seriously considered trying to find a place to live and staying in Cheyenne.  Nor do I recall the conversation with my husband, or how I explained to Al that I was coming to Washington.  I’d be willing to bet anything, I didn’t tell the truth.  Knowing the person I was at the time, I probably told him I missed him too much to wait.  Anyway, that’s the first plausible lie that comes to mind now.  

  By the time Marie and I got to Tacoma, Al had rented us a house. 

  

  • 4:41 pm
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