1964 - 401
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I had two ruling passions: waves and tits. OK, three passions. I was going out with a girl who had beautiful pointy tits. Since Summer occasionally let me squeeze her beautiful pointy things I tried to see her as often as I could. I ended up going to a lot of places I wouldn't ordinarily appear without a disguise and an alias.
Her breasts pointed the way to movies, miniature golf, and to the right. Not a physical deformity right but a John Birch political kind of right. I had the political awareness of bacteria but that didn't stop me from signing on to the cause, even if the cause was covered in a bra. It was later I noticed how busy she was during the meetings. Busy talking about herself, if not directly, then in a kind of roundabout way. She never attended a meeting without telling someone that her father voted for Kennedy. Sometimes I thought she was asking for forgiveness the way reformed Christians are want to discuss their past transgressions. Sometimes I thought she was bragging the way those same Christians like to discuss those same transgressions. And at all times I thought she was in attendance because it undoubtedly burned the hell out of her old man. Which was the same reason that she went out with me.
Like most of our parents, her old man thought any off-center group was filled with lunatics. Judging on the basis of the few times I spoke with him, I don't think he'd have any trouble fitting right into the Birchers. In America, as a rule, we drive on the right side of the road. As for Summer's purposes, left and right were the same direction. If she could have found one, she would have dragged me to a ban-the-bomb meeting and I surely would have followed her with my tongue hanging out and my fingers itching. Left and right felt equally good to me also.
"Welcome to the lunatic fringe."
"What's my choice?" I said looking around for the trail to the food.
Summer had gone into the main room to strut around and I was confronted by a girl about my age. She was studying me seriously and I was now furtively scanning the room. "Didn't you say welcome to the fridge?"
She had that sweet nastiness that young girls sometimes carry in their giggle. I immediately felt a rush of blood to my groin.
As we picked up the pieces where our words had crashed, I discovered that it was her parents who ran the cadre and that like good teenagers everywhere, she thought her mother and father were full of shit.
She was a little too round in the middle, not the kind of girl a guy like me should want to rub up against but that was her effect on me. I looked for her whenever I came in the door and she greeted me with "welcome to the lunatic fridge." She'd follow that up with something like, "Remember, if you're not white, you're red and if you're red, you're dead." Then she'd point her finger at me like it was a pistol and fire.
Had there been a depth to me, a texture that included a strong secure character, I would have dumped Summer and took up with her. Instead, I went to war with myself. I feared the congress of voices that would have ridiculed me for having forsaken Summer to pursue another agenda. So I kept my intentions to myself believing I could manipulate events so that I could have it all, both Summer and my Bircher girl. I pretended I was the president of love affairs and this was my great social achievement.
When the three of us were together Summer pretended she wasn't in the same room as my Bircher Buddy or she acted bored, frequently yawning and stretching out her ample chest. I think some of that admiration became mutual because my Bircher Buddy began to refer to Summer as "Dummer".
Once, during spring break, I saw my Bircher Buddy at the beach. I hid. I was with some of the guys and I didn't want to hear any whale stuff or dog stuff. But I was embarrassed for myself and I wish I'd gone up and talked to her. But I didn't. I hid. In my mind I thought I would ask her out to make it right but lots of events have happened in my mind that never took place.
As if to even the karma, my next date with the grand tetons did not go well. She said something stupid or self-centered that didn't include me and I clammed up and shut her off.
Have you ever seen one of those billboards with several messages in it? One image after another placed on aluminum panels that roll into place. I'm like that. One part of me surfaces in front of the others. It even happens in the water. I can have a howling good time or I can scowl through a session of surfing, pissed that I was cut off or cursing my wave selection, acting like a kid with the wrong ice cream flavor in his cone. It's that way with girls. Click and the panels with the images snap in place. I'm light and loose and tickling from within. Click. I'm bogged down, a grip of muck smothering me, sucking me down. Click. I'm sitting next to breasts but can't bear to look in her direction. Click. I can't get close enough to the sound of her voice and all I think about is giving her sagacity a feel.
"Did you read about it?" He had white hair and bushy eyebrows and hair coming out his ears and the cock-eyed way he looked at me gave me the willies. "Did you read about it? That coward Johnson didn't have the guts to go fight Communism on his own so he had to trump up a Pearl Harbor. But that's fine with me, if he needs a Gulf of Tonkin to get congress to get their head out of the sand and see the dangers lying off our coast, then give them a Tonkin. Give them a world full of Tonkins. It's us or them and there is no vice in the defense of liberty."
I read the comics and sports pages. But if I had read about this gulf and Johnson had asked my advice, I could have told him to stay away from gulf waters. They never break unless a hurricane nears and then it's too out of control to be any good to ride. When the President called, I must not have been at home.
"Someone should arrest that troublemaker, King," the white haired old man continued, "He's a Communist dupe out to weaken our society." King didn't scare me. I was all for that civil rights stuff, but then it was a pretty easy decision; people of color don't surf, except Hawaiians, and they pretty much stay in Hawaii.
Surrounded by so much political rhetoric I began to question my own deeply held beliefs. I began to wonder if tits were really worth it.
I was saved from further dialogue with the old man by my friend, "I hear you've been two-timing us, attending another group like this," she coyly quizzed me. "You're card-carrying for some Bible beaters."
Damon was pursuing a girl who had, among other attributes, a religious background. He began to attend a church group and he brought me along for laughs and so I couldn't make fun of him for attending. I went from a group who saw political meaning in the color of the punch they served to a group who could make no connections between beliefs and actions.
I told her, "They're nothing like this throng. They're not complaining about conspiracies, they're praising their position next to God."
She gave me a circumspect eye. Perhaps she realized that I wasn't the analytical genius she took me for. "What's the first thing our people do when they walk into a room?" This wasn't a new joke between us so I was ready, "They check under the tables for Commies and queers." "And your Bible thumbers?" "The same," I had to admit. They were men of conviction. But I knew there was something more. Many of them were over-protective of their daughters. After leaving the house all prim and proper in their father's eyes, you could find the young girls putting on make-up outside the school yard or rolling up their skirt so they didn't look like the Pennsylvania Dutch. Dates were forbidden except occasionally by someone who was a friend of the family. They were men of conviction but not men of faith. And it wasn't only in their daughters they lacked faith. They routinely disparaged our institutions of government as giving too many rights away to the population. They had conviction alright, but no faith in anything but that conviction.
The youth ministers were good people. They always wore green on St. Paddy's day, never went out of their way to beat dogs, and kept their lawns watered. We lived in a region supported by aerospace production. By day, they were defense workers. I have no doubt they were diligent hard working employees. It must have been peculiar to be so disconnected from your work. The workers went about their tasks trying to do a good job and yet hoping no one ever found out just how good. The payloads and delivery systems they manufactured were weapons so horrific that their use defied comprehension. I guess they achieved better religion through assured destruction. I'll say this for them, they did know how to pray. They could thank the Lord for all kinds of things I never considered that remarkable such as Damon's and my presence at their little gatherings.
One kid in the church group always bothered me. He was a baby-fat kind of a kid named Dewy who seemed to be the type of student who invariably knew the answer sometimes to questions we never asked. He had several pet topics that he liked to bring before the group. Among those topics was the contention that the United States must have a first strike scenario and contingencies for using that capability or its arsenal could not really be a deterrent to the Commies. The Soviets must be as uncertain and fearful of the U.S. as we are of them for a Cold War to continue. Since most of us assumed that the official policy of our democracy was that we would only use those weapons in defense, the implication was that we didn't know what our government was about. To be honest, I didn't really know what he was talking about or for that matter what the hell our government was about. I found I didn't need to follow his arguments if I could employ effective debate techniques.
Baby-fat kid: "The godless Soviets have to fear a nuclear strike or why should they maintain their borders. What's to stop them from expanding in a non-nuclear manner with a conventional military assault?"
Me: "You don't have to worry about it Dewdrops, the army doesn't take homos."
Or
Baby-fat kid: "The point of Christ dying on the cross was the physical manifestation of love conquering all enemies. When the authorities tried to wipe out the Christian religion, the deaths of the martyrs proved Christianity would not die. Are we afraid that our faith is not that strong, that it can't outlast an invasion so we continue an arms race?"
Me: "Yeh, but Christ never met a Commie."
Such wit ended discussion with no rebuke from the youth leaders, only knowing nods. And Dewdrops, invariably shrunk from further discussion. That was the real victory, the silence of his dissension. It could have been different. In a war of wits he was armed with the machine gun while I had the blunderbuss. My Bircher Buddy could have shown him a thing or two. I recall an argument she was having with a neo-conservative (fascist by any other name). He was a young, class affirming college student a couple of years older than us. She was more than holding her own against him. Finally, in a tactic worthy of my own true self, he said, "You know, with a little bit of trimming down and a bit of make-up you just might be able to get a date."
She didn't pause long enough for him to congratulate himself. "But I'm waiting, just like you are, for a powerful authoritarian man to sweep me off my feet. I just hope that you don't get to him before I do, because I'm not sure I can match the adoration a flirt like you can martial when you see something attractive to you like a big strong autocratic man."
He didn't even try to rally his forces. His troops were in disarray.
The Birchers weren't mainstream but they were at least afloat in the current and as they moved down the river baiting and propagandizing, they tended to pull most of us along. Guys like Dewy were without a proverbial paddle having had it thrown away further upstream.
"Wasn't it nice they waited for us?" Damon and I were late to the church gathering since we had been shooting baskets outside in the dark. I couldn't answer him because I'd caught sight of something quite beautiful and had become transfixed on her face. She wasn't gorgeous beautiful, more cute beautiful. The type of girl who I could watch forever, the way her hand went up to her mouth when she chuckled, the fix of her gaze while her head tilted to the side. The girls in the group were circled around her and I peeked through them to try to see her form. She wore a thigh-length skirt that made me groan. She was older, maybe even twenty, certainly not beyond fantasy age.
Next to her, surrounded by the young men of the group was her husband. He was leaving on a mission to some third world country I'd never heard of. While I was moaning over his wife, the guys were oohing and ahhing over his soon-to-be adventure.
"To hell with exploring the great unknown, I want to explore the marvelous known of your wife," I said under my breath.
"What's wrong?" Damon asked.
He had seen me shaking my head.
"The guy must be out of his mind to leave that alone."
Damon shrugged. "I wouldn't mind going where he's going. I think it would be neat."
"That's where we part company. I wouldn't mind going where he's been. I could be happy forever in her arms."
"How long is forever?" Damon asked.
No answer by me.
"Just as I thought. Forever is as long as you ain't got it and then it's off to see the dark side of the moon."
Both the church group and the Birchers were frequently asked by God for their advice and they frequently gave it through their blessings. When the heads were bowed and the righteous were deep in their own prayer there was an invocation that my Bircher babe murmured. It always gave me a shiver and I thought in all earnestness it was because she was purring in my ear but it was because the images were crawling under my skin to lay in wait.
"God bless the warriors brave and strong.
God bless those who fight for right or wrong.
God bless the men who fight and kill.
God bless their courage and their will.
God bless the orders that they carry.
God bless the bullets that will bury.
God bless the bombs that explode.
God bless the mines that line the road.
God bless the terror raining from the sky.
God bless the collateral damage that dies.
God bless the women.
God bless the children.
God bless the creatures small and great.
God bless those innocent of everything but place.
God bless the land cratered and shelled.
God bless the earth made into a hell.
God bless the warriors brave and strong because
I'm not about to."
Ironically, it was Summer who found true religion. She got an offer to become one of the Goldwater girls and her political clothes went mainstream. She looked mighty fine in the little red, white, and blue get-up they gave her to wear and she was always good about finding enthusiasm for a cause. Needless to say my days as a mountain man were over. She found some good clean-cut young Republican to lead the wagon train.
I still went to all the meetings but I didn't have to pretend interest. I found my Bircher Buddy, grabbed a handful of goodies and off we went outside. I pushed a porch swing back and forth while she laid on a recliner. We gossiped about people we knew and didn't know. We giggled over the goofy teachers we had and were excited together about some interesting event of the day. I listened when she told me someone was cool and when she turned up her nose at one of my friends I looked harder at them.
She ended our relationship, such as it was. "I'm moving to Cowshit Valley located in the middle of that vast wasteland known as Wyoming."
I was disbelieving. I thought I had all the time in the world to be with her.
"My parents say that it is where Amerikans are still Amerikans."
I never pined for Summer, at least not all of her, but this was different. This was personal. And I didn't know why. I was accustomed to sharing experiences, that's what guys do. They play sports or go out on some kind of run to a nearby town or explore a new trail or some such thing and then we're friends more or less. But the two of us hadn't even played ping-pong together. We just talked and talked. And giggled and laughed.
Splendor kisses the coast. In any season, on any day the beach holds my attention: the massive boulders like totems guarding the shore, the white puffs of sand scooped by the elements, the dark tidal mark, the way the remnants of the outgoing water lightly prance through the sand back to join the others, the constant frothing head on the full bounty of the waves. Each element buttons the light, wearing it slightly different so that its twinkles flirt in a most seductive manner. I could see it in the sheen off the water but was too blind to see it in her reflection, hear it in the lap of the wave but too deaf to hear it in that contagious giggle of hers, feel it in the sun-heated shallows of the tidal pool but too numb and callous with what passes as beauty to feel it in those times she warmly pressed against me.
The day after she left I drove down to check out the surf.
"You really missed it. It was good yesterday," the voice said.
"Oh, yeh," I replied, my too ardent agreement spooking the guy, "I really missed it."