1969 - SUMMER
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Pregnancy ruins paradise. Damon traded sun, surf, and sand for a fucking driveway. He moved from the shore to being land- locked. Damon had turned serious and seriousness is serious if not terminal. It is a breach of youth.
Damon's girlfriend got pregnant and he got married and took on extra work with the construction crew. I missed both the ceremony and the reception since they were held during final's week.
I didn't see much of him after that. He was too busy working overtime. He only had Sundays off and Sundays were spent with his wife. But we did have one last great go-out. He had gotten off early on a Saturday and given me a call to go surfing. I'd already had a look and decided not to go in the water but the prospect of companionship had an overriding appeal to me. My girlfriend, Leeza, was late by two weeks and Damon's fate would serve as a reminder but I wanted to see him again anyway.
The renewal of Damon's friendship was tentative. We moved gingerly around each other. He didn't drive up and immediately throw his arms around me in an embrace of old times. That would have been uncharacteristic of both of us.
"You run into Snake?"
"Snake's up north last I heard."
"How's Rallio? Has he written?"
"Yeh, he's written and he sent his regards if I was to see you." I wanted to know more but Damon wasn't forthcoming and I felt an undercurrent of agitation on the subject so I didn't press.
The surf was the friend we both still had in common and it acted as chairman of the reunion committee. The waves were lousy. As we stood there looking out at the small waves and shooting the breeze over swells we had seen both together and apart, we noticed a commotion at the rivermouth and we strolled over to check it out. A couple of row boats were scouring the lagoon as groups of people along the shore peered into the water. Damon recognized an acquaintance and inquired about the proceedings.
"Someone let an alligator loose and the berm is blocking its path to the ocean, not that it would like the salt water anyway. Ward Sumption is running the search and destroy mission."
We paced the water's edge looking for anything of interest. Eventually, Damon squatted down and reached into the water.
"I think I've got something, Mr. Stump."
"Sumption."
"No, I think it's a fish." Damon raised a handful of muck out of the water and eyed it as it dripped down his arm and revealed the silvery scales.
"Okay, where's the gator?" Damon gave the fish the third degree and then put his hand back in the water.
"He ain't talking, Mr. Stump? What should we do?" I wanted to know with great gravity directed at Sumption.
"I think we can loosen his tongue."
Stump was moving away.
"Maybe, but do fish have tongues?"
Damon shook his hand under the water. "Listen Mr. Fish, where's the gator."
"Give up the gator and we'll give up the water torture. He ain't talkin', Damon. Give him the business."
Damon shook his hand again. "Talk fish, you've got the gator stashed somewhere, don't you?"
"I think you've drowned him. Let him serve as an example to the other fish that we mean business and they could suffer the same fate."
Damon let him go and brought his hand up shaking off the wet.
"You can't drown a fish." He was challenging us and he was about seven years old.
"Are you looking for the alligator?" We asked him.
"Nooo," he scoffed.
"No? Why not?"
"I don't want to find an alligator. It's his home. He knows all the hiding places."
It was a good observation and we tried to counter its wisdom since we hadn't thought of it. "Suppose we find his home?"
The boy was not impressed by our aged learning. "I'm not going to reach my hand into his house." And he balled up his fingers and contracted his arm. I unconsciously did the same.
The search party began to talk about draining the river or pumping salt water further upstream to kill the alligator and we began to talk about leaving.
Damon wanted to get back to his family to spend some time with them and I had been hired for the night to pour beverages at a private country club located on the beach. We parted with promises of keeping in touch but as I watched him go a curious funk began to set in. I told myself it was just the reminder of Leeza's condition and perhaps it was, but I tended to believe it was the reminder of all our conditions.
Left alone, I began to reflect on Leeza. The words I had said to her when we had first met were coming back to haunt me. "Leeza, what a pretty name since that's what I want to do, lease you, not own you."
I pulled into the driveway and found my old man watching a ball game on the tube. Since that was one of the last remaining activities the two of us could do together peaceably, I slumped into a chair next to him.
“A’s winning?”
“Yeh, Catfish Hunter’s on the mound. Untouchable, damnit.”
The three batters were retired in order.
My old man hated Oakland. They weren’t true baseball players playing for the love of the game. “You have to admit that looks awfully funny sticking out of his cap like that. They should fine them or something. Make them cut that hair.” He thought Oakland players lacked a team ethos. They were all money grubbing players looking out for number one. At the plate was Sal Bando. He was a little shaggy but no one would have mistaken him for a rock star.
My old man’s tone had not been aggressive. It was criticism alright but in an observational kind of a way. I didn’t get the feeling that it had been a salvo aimed at me as sometimes his attacks were. “What difference does it make? He can either play or not.” I said, measuring the expression in my voice.
“It’s a question of civility.”
“Oh, that’s why they shave your head before they turn you loose to kill men, women, and children so you can be civil.” I had jumped to the offensive with too much force, I knew it, but I couldn’t refrain from it. My old man wasn’t a raging venom spewing warmonger. He didn’t scorn my attempt to change my draft classification. From what I could detect, he didn’t think the war in Vietnam was being handled correctly. But what that exactly meant was open to interpretation. Five years into the public acknowledgement of U.S. troop participation in Vietnam, it was clear something was terribly wrong. World War II had only lasted four years after we had gotten into it and 1 year after D-day. And Vietnam hardly resembled either Germany or Japan. That arithmetic fact wasn’t lost on too many Americans. The young faces of the dead were published in the newspapers and magazines with an accompanying article that contained a quote by some Pentagon official expressing optimism about our position versus the enemy. Whether one could resist it or not, it wasn’t hard to recognize a sucker's bet when your losses are piled up in front of you on the table. Who’s going to tell 35,000 mothers, fathers, and wives that their loved ones died for nothing? Most Americans wanted the damn thing over with. If that meant killing every Vietnamese, North or South, then kill ‘em, just get it over with quickly and get out. Nothing succeeds like success and success has a way of painting a broad whitewash.
“Bullroar. You fix on one small truth that you think you know and exaggerate it out of all proportions until you make it fit the universal. But real life ain’t that simple. Just because someone chooses to enlist in the military doesn’t make him a mad killer or a Nazi, contrary to how you may want to believe. Change takes time. It’s a process. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be learning that from whatever it is you’re studying in that school of yours.”
The two of us could escalate quicker than Johnson and McNamara put together. My old man wanted me to major in something like engineering but I picked history based on my first quarter's grades. I showed an aptitude towards history by actually passing a history class. My father told me I couldn't get a job with a history degree, but I wasn't thinking about work, only how to avoid it. And being unskilled and unlearned was as good a way of avoiding it as any other.
“You don’t want to know the lessons I’ve learned. You send me to school but heaven help me if I come back with knowledge contrary to your world view. Well I’ve got news for you. The world is evil and we’re part of that evil.” I was overstating my case again. Perhaps not overstating but failing to account for the prejudices of my audience that would make my message receptive to him. Nixon had called them the “silent majority”. It was a statement meant to cast aspersions on those protesting his and Kissinger’s deceipt and treachery but it accurately portrayed most of the electorate. My old man would wait for the next election and vote again to end the war, one way or another, "‘cause that’s how things are done." I couldn’t wait.
“Bullroar again. You haven’t seen real evil. But one thing is certain, the rabble parading around the campuses are not going to change things for the better. They won’t be happy until it all tumbles down. I hope you’re at least smart enough to stay out of those riots.”
“Not smart enough but I think I’m fast enough.”
That wasn’t the least bit amusing to him. “Don’t call here if you get arrested. I’ll have no sympathy for you.”
I got up to get ready for my job. It was the end to another enlightening dialogue. “I don’t know why I even try,” I parted from the room.
I arrived early at the country club and was awarded a white coat and a bow tie. "Bond, James Bond," I told the nearest guy made up like me. We did some 007 turns and tried on some coolness to match the coat.
"Who are you two?" He was meaning business.
We humbly explained that we were the help and James Bond's license to kill was revoked and in its place were orders of a servile nature which we quickly began to dispatch. We were now licensed to serve.
Throughout the evening the guests wandered outside onto a terrace that overlooked the beach. From their vantage point, they could see below those attending a free event sponsored by the city. On the sand a crowd of high school and college aged kids were busy dancing and mingling. A battle of the bands is a way of attracting low cost entertainment that engages the local youth. The city had set up two stages and invited a half-dozen bands to play one set each during which they'd be judged on some criteria known only to the judges. I would have preferred to be among the crowd watching and dancing but I was only reminded of the event after I'd made the committment to be a waiter.
Leeza was on the beach with her girlfriends. During the evening, I tried not to cast my eyes out towards the bands for fear I'd see her. It was not because I cared if she saw me in my get- up, but rather because I wanted to avoid her for as long as possible knowing she might bring me bad news. Bad news would mean that she was pregnant.
"She'd probably look good in a lacy white veil," I mused. But then I whined to myself, "I don't want to get married. It's not in my plans to set up housekeeping with her." Food had lost its appeal. My stomach felt like it was trying to get itself out of the circumstance by climbing through my skin. It was like it was telling the rest of my body, you did this, not me, so I'm splitting.
As the night progressed the guests at the country club were quite concerned with what was going on at the party down on the beach. Some on the sand were undoubtedly their own children but they acted as if they didn't know or want to know any of the kids. It was a widespread belief among the young that their parents would have brought the country to a grinding halt with riots and civil disobedience if those being drafted were not their children but their pets.
"What a racket, how can they hear the words? It's not music it's a cacophony," said one middle-aged lady then went off to dance to the big band sounds of Cliff King and His Band of Swing.
The orchestra was playing an upbeat number and I left the bald old men leering at the lean young profiles on the beach and slipped inside hoping to catch the dancers jitterbugging and swinging but I was disappointed. They were disconnected bodies busy imitating the dance moves of the younger generation and looking pukingly silly in doing it. The band was playing "Making Whoopee". Just the reminder I wanted. That alliterative ass Agnew was climbing all over rock lyrics. Did he ever listen to the sounds of his own generation? "Baby, it's cold outside.” Yeh and I've got just the thing to warm you.
"Maybe she'll give me the baby and I could raise it on my own," I fantasized. I could be a great influence on a kid. Yeh, a great influence alright but a great good influence, or a great bad influence? "Well," I thought, "Abandoning Leeza is out of the question." It wasn't any sense of virtue but because of ego. I wasn't about to let go easily of something that I had a claim on. And a product of your genes is a pretty substantial claim.
"How's the booze holding up?" It was an open bar and the efficacious manager was taking inventory. "These old guys are like sponges. They sop it up, go to the head, wring it out and they're dry again ready to soak up some more."
"How much longer we got to listen to King Cliff and His Band of Shit?" My fellow spy was restless.
"They'll be breaking up in due time."
I wondered how many of these happy couples started on the road together because of the unintended consequence of a union. How many got knocked up and stared down the barrel of a shotgun? That was before abortion. Nowadays that was certainly an option but it was distasteful to me. If Leeza introduced it, then we could discuss the option, otherwise, I wasn't going to suggest it.
I clanked the edges of empty glasses as I cleared them from the table. Above my ruckus she asked, "Young man, you ain't like those pot-smoking longhairs on the beach?"
"No, I like hard work and decent living." She applauded the answer but I thought I detected a let down.
"Oh yeh, and did I mention that I like to put my girlfriend, who is not married to me, in the family way." I said it only in my mind. They believed, like I believed, that marriage gives permission for sex. Otherwise, you better not get caught. Even adults have to ask permission. It's silly but it seems we never cease raising our hands to be excused to take a pee.
Not everyone was of my parent's generation. Several couples were quite young in years. They had all the fine attributes that make old men remember and old women jealous but they were like cut lawn next to the Spring hillside. Whether because of fear or poor upbringing, from the neck up they were Republicans. I eyed the prettier girls in their pastel party dresses and slipped fondling fingers around the old myth that girls like that were waiting to be unleashed and their splendidly dressed boyfriends in their suit and ties couldn't do it. I knew that many of the girls, straight or freaky, found men with long flowing locks to be sexy. It was a peculiar struggle. The causes were immanent in the American psyche and the commercial culture reinforced it. Anything new was touted, paraded out in sequins, clammered for, you wanted to be the first one on your block to possess it. You could toss an insult at someone by saying "you're old". It was those over 30 that had the means and those under 30 that wanted, needed, or were at the least most effected by what the older crowd had. The musicians in the band might be using false ID but the ones drawing up the contracts, erecting the billboards with the band's picture on Sunset Blvd., putting out the money for the liquor and the drugs, distributing and even playing the tunes to the radio stations, setting up the media appearances, and in general, orchestrating the career moves, hadn't been carded since prohibition.
When my work was done for the night, I changed into my striped bells and headed down to the beach. The first sweet smell of dope told me I was among friends. The long hair and billowing painted clothes were a welcomed sight. Leeza was dressed in a vest outfit and pants called hip huggers because they were worn very low on the hip. Her feet were bare beneath the flare of her pants. Her simple prettiness escaped me as I concentrated on the problem between us. The worry didn't show on her face and when I found out she hadn't heard from the clinic and her period had still not come that disturbed me. Why wasn't she worried? Was she looking at this prospect as some kind of a find? Didn't every girl, no matter what they say, want to get married? If boys lie and promise to get a taste of what they want, what's to stop a girl from doing whatever it takes to get hers?
A band was kicking up feedback and blowing a big disturbance of drums in a wild groove but I looked at her and all I heard was the lecture my parents were going to give me. "How could you ruin your life? We didn't send you away to college for this. This makes us look cheap. Cheap and low class." And there'd be a rush to get the wedding over before she began to show.
She bobbed her head and shook her shoulders. "I love this song. C'mon, dance with me," she cooed.
Refusal was foremost on my tongue but I secretly hoped something might be shaken loose so I consented. Like always, I danced like a self-conscious spastic. I was passed a "J" by someone I knew and it helped set me at ease. It had to be someone you knew not because you feared being handed a foreign substance, although I suppose that was a possibility, you had to be careful about narcs.
"Honey," again she cooed, "would you get me a coke? I'm thirsty." I didn't like that manipulative voice. If you're thirsty, fine, just ask, and I'll get you something but don't pretend you've got to sweet talk me into responding.
"Honey!" Her voice moved towards the edges. "You're not paying attention." The thing I really disliked in a woman was bitchiness. Sooner or later it always came out. Scratch any female and there's a termagant at her core.
As she turned towards me I saw her eye follow a guy with long hair down his back and dressed in moccasins, beads and strands of dangling leather. He had an untrimmed half-beard that made him resemble, depending on the light, the Zig-Zag man or Christ. I didn't let on that I noticed that unfaithful gaze looking for other game.
"I'm sorry, I know you're tired. It's just that I've been waiting all night for you to get off work and now I feel like I've got all this energy to release. Maybe I should have went to the store before I came here and bought something to drink."
I winced under the incorrect usage. Sometimes she said dumb things. I wondered just how bright she really was. I'd hate to have a kid who was stupid. I'd rather he be ugly. Unless it's a girl then I guess it's better that she's good looking.
Crows feet tread around her eyes. She probably won't age well, I thought. She snuggled in against the encroaching night dew rising out of the ocean and leaned her head on my arm but I wasn't buying. I was like a block wall.
The night ended and I drove her home.
The phone rang in the morning and it was Leeza telling me "her friend" had arrived. "Her friend" as she called it was always an annoyance to me before but it had quickly become my best buddy and I was overjoyed to know it was back in town.
I was free and I felt great about it. The world looked big and beautiful. And, of course, the first thing I wanted to do was take Leeza in my arms, pull her clothes off, and hit the sack.