TEXAS STORIES Map,
Initiation, Ascension and Test WAR AND PEACE IN AMERICA
1955-1968
LaGuardia Airport to Tyler, Texas is more than the sum
of its air miles.
When I was sixteen and a rising senior living in
Paramus, NJ, I spent an innocent summer with my grandmother on my father's
side in Tyler, Texas.
Riding the crop duster DC-3 from Dallas, hot
rusty hematite reds and lush golf course greens swept alongside the
100-mile glide between runways.
I was truly innocent on that flight --
not just about sex, but how life stretched you faster than you could
grow.
Years later, I would compare that memory to the topography of
Vietnam that ran through the tree line and below the canopy. I would think
then, looking back at Tyler, when you fly with death, dreams are not
fatuous.
TYLER TEXAS Tuesday, July 12, 1955
East Texas
in 1955 was an ordinary place with people not too different from Bergen
County, NJ.
In Edgewater and Paramus New Jersey, we were good
white folks living on a beach facing a great city island. One bridge
joined us, and that same bridge stopped us from knowing the other side of the
creek. Like many war babies I was bound by accidental roots and dishonest
assumptions about race, sex and war.
I lived in a town called "wild
turkey," that prided itself on not having any gooks or niggers as residents.
I played on Little League baseball teams that had no Jackie Robinson and
no one, no matter what their pretensions, that would become a star
athlete.
Downtown Tyler was different from today. Brick and
mortar two-story buildings mixed with some post-war brick and glass. I am
sure there was that famous architectural landmark, a Sears building, but I
don't remember it.
Stepping up and into the summer the sidewalks and
macadam streets held the heat. Every step burned your feet. To escape I
sat endlessly in family cars riding shotgun or playing the good, but never
quiet, nephew in the back seat. I memorized the signs along the road. I can
almost count the moments after the car turned or didn't. I wanted new
roads.
WEATHER REPORTS
All day the heat grew; at night, it
never seemed to cool. I realize now after South Vietnam and Laos that the
air was just catching its breath.
On Sunday we went to church.
Sometimes we attended a revival. I was a Catholic Jewish boy in a
Protestant America. My grandmother, when she took me to the holy rollers,
told me not to be saved unless I really meant it and would be able to go to a
real church at home.
She said, "Henry, you come from a line of
barnstorming Iowa preachers. You're a good boy and you don't lie about
God."
I could hear my great, great grandfather Chapman Marshall in
Cresco, Iowa "raising thunder" as the obituary said from 1906. I finally
understood my love of language. Sex was the other.
As a boy I heard an
uncle on my mother's side once say at a famous gathering of the clans near
Budd Lake, New Jersey "famous men had big peckers."
THE
EDDY
My great aunt, aunt, uncle or cousins drove many a night to fish
at a slight river, an eddy. As a current of water an eddy moves contrary to
the direction of the main current, especially in a circular
motion.
Walking its soft bank hardly cooled. Sweating and itching, it
seemed an artifact of a primeval moss and fern nightmare that trapped the
landscape. I was told it was a theater for macabre murders although none
were committed to the best of my knowledge. I am not sure what I thought,
besides wonder, in 1955.
Every time I hit the LZ in Nam, I connected to
that eddy. Desire for death and survival was not unlike the drive
of tadpole to a frog. Pacing river waters, kicking the sticks, fishing
with my Uncle Darrel, I sang out of tune as I stepped over broken rocks and
just missed cutting my foot on broken beer and soda pop bottles. I must
have found half a dozen Trojans that I collected as balloons, blowing them
up until my uncle took them away. Every few feet I'd measure my stubbed toes
and mosquito bites to see how much of myself had been lost.
In 'Nam,
one day during Tet I lost somebody every hour.
Back at the eddy, breaking
into tall weeds I tripped, pretending to escape the alien hoard of Buck
Rodgers careening through the riverine scraggle. Squeezed in the uterus
gooseneck of the sick mud that pickled between my toes, I was every monster
movie ever made.
MOSQUITOES
In Texas, still a boy, I counted
toes and kept a record of dead mosquitoes as I mashed them against the
pine wallboard next to my bed. Their blood, my blood, ran like the serial
murder of children through the dark abuse of the fist. With my graceful index
finger I crushed them to knotted pine. Every scar and scab was a totem of
an insect's failed adventure. Or had it already succeeded? We just didn't
know the rites.
Later, while I slept under an historic fan
barely electric, I realized death gave me pleasure. No, I didn't kill dogs
and cats. I was no Ted Bundy.
As a medic in Nam, imaginary murders
flushed my mind when my face was blood stained and my eyes flashing. I
have never murdered anyone, but I imagined it. Haven't you once in your
life done the same? Does that make us killers?
SNAKE GUARDED
EDDY
After that first night on the eddy, I could imagine myself naked
driving my body into the frenzy of a butterfly trance on that east Texas
eddy.
I dreamed I swam that snake-guarded eddy. I stepped out too far,
ready to drown, not die. Off balance, when my internal music stopped, I knew
that the skin of the earth had captured me. I would never be the
same.
My Pentecostal uncle by marriage, Darrel, was a good man who had
no idea that a god other than his had taken me alive.
Sex was his evil,
not mine. It coursed through my spirit driving my imagination like the
fornicating flies and maggots, mosquito and larvae.
Hard to imagine
sex as a sin when everyone sought it, did it, and lied about doing it. As sex
was hidden and forbidden, it never existed. Why does it seem that
logic protects the surface of truth? I believe it, but don't understand
it.
Tyler in 1955 was rustic with tough tree branches. Not bucolic,
not pastoral. It had a rough edge that could, under extreme circumstances,
define in one part beauty and in another, pain.
How could you know the
truth about a place when everywhere you looked the signs said White
Only?
In Tyler, as everywhere, the gentle whorehouse rises next to the
First Baptist church steeple.
Tyler was a good myth, and I believed
it.
Everyone said the city rode a salt dome of oil. Imagine all that
money floating upward and change raining down from heaven. It could have, but
it was hard to believe that no one drilled the wells. I believed for that
moment the myth was more accurate than logic could disprove. Oil rises,
forcing you up higher on your toes. Impossible distances are
accepted.
Yes, I loved the lush greens, and the sickly swamps
where frogs faked away at the noise. I remember humping at that tree line
keeping track of the nests where snipers drown life. You could thrive up on
your toes, stretching, and the swamp could force you higher above the
moss.
Fishing with grubs and spoons, on a Texas eddy at
night, levitation was easy as catching lightning bugs.
WAR AND
PEACE IN AMERICA 1955-1968 Sunday, July 12, 1959
I grew up in Paramus,
NJ during the 1950s. There were no black students at Paramus High School. I
was one of 204 people in the first graduating class of 1960. That is
fact.
In 1959, during the summer before my senior year, I laughed when
my Texas grandmother said, "You stink like a nigger."
In Tyler, Texas
you could find Negroes as well-meaning white folks called them, but you had
to look. They worked in the kitchen at the country club, but never as cook
or waiter. They were made invisible.
COUNTRY CLUB
At the
country club swimming pool, pink cheeks splashed and breasts fell out, making
the water a collage of heads bobbing into a sparkling clean
shimmer.
In the noise of that play, water fights chilled the
blank blue skies and intense moist heat of my Tyler summer.
Walking
out on the pool deck, no dark eyes tumbled into cannon balls on the surface
of the noon white glare. No ebony life guards to blow the pale girls out of
their one piece, heavily armored bathing suits from the arms of white
boys. No deep-penetrating Afro- American or Hispanic muscle men, with deep V
and muscular thighs to balance the hardheaded stares of white-boy
football players with strong backs and crossed arms.
Imagine two great
walls facing each other, but only one wall was allowed to win. Jim Crow had
fixed the game, but that would soon change.
That summer I asked
myself, where did the black faces and dark eyes live that some newspapers
said by omission didn't exist, while others talked about the "Negro
problem."
One weekend in August I found them, more invisible than oil
beneath the surface of the Tyler streets.
"Look downtown," one old white
man said when I asked carefully where the coloreds lived.
"Maybe in
your mama's kitchen," he spit when the laughs died, adding at the end, "or
maybe back in Yankee land, where you better get before I kick your
nigger-loving ass."
As I started to leave, a fat man with thick hands
said, "How about your daddy's bed." There were many dark eyes there, but
when I saw them, or they sold candy on the street in front of the five and
dime, there was a pause and returned blank stare. What are you doing here
it silently said? Get out of here. I recognized instinctively that the
rule ran both ways down the color of the street.
I watched everything
grow and growl with impossible and disintegrating boundaries. At sixteen how
could I know what was real or imaginary? I didn't know some of it would
change.
There may be a connection between my pursuit of intimacy and
my first sexual experiments. I discovered that summer new ways to know myself
in others.
GRANDMA KATE & CARLA
Grandma Kate was a large,
stout woman, a practical nurse. She had an easy laugh and followed home-style
Iowa preacher rules. She worked the best houses in white Texas caring for
the young children of the rich doctors on the important side of
town.
That summer I tagged along with her, jostling the rich kids,
straining their toys, swimming pools. Many of the homes where Grandma worked
were full of great vistas and soft waterfall air conditioners. I admit I felt
pampered
In one doctor's kitchen curious I investigated the unknown
black face of Carla, the cook. I marveled at Carla's huge breasts. I couldn't
even think the word then without being nervous. When she rubbed them to clean
the flour off her hands, she knew I was staring and she laughed.
Carla
was young, and her breasts simply got in the way when she walked. They did
not hang down but poured forward. If you walked by, you got poked by one of
them. When it happened she'd smile and say, excuse me. I would smile back,
brush my hair from my eyes, and gaze to her black edges.
One night, as
Carla dressed in the bathroom, I sneaked into the edge of the door of the
next room. The bathroom door was open a crack, and I could see the expanse of
her body.
When Carla stepped out of the steam and mist her
breasts were like brown mountains. I had wished for years that I was that
black baby suckling in the National Geographic.
After a week of peeking
and playing eye tag, Carla came up behind me, and said softly, "I know what
you are doing, and if you don't stop, I'm gonna tell your grandmother. Now
get!"
I ran away with my head down.
Later when I was almost asleep
and Grandma was off playing canasta with her cronies, Carla just walked
into my room in an open robe. I felt my throat close.
Dancing forward
she rolled belly and mountains and fed me her sexy bread.
"If I let
you see it once, close up, will that be enough?"
I stared at her eyes and
smiled, and blinked, and reached for her extended hand. Carla must have been
only twenty- five, but any adult seemed ancient.
"We have to be quick,
and you had better not tell a soul," she warned.
Sitting down, I
folded into her lap. She could have crushed me and I would have been
happy.
"Now what do you want," pulling my head down. "You white babies
want the same thing."
I said nothing. She was my master.
"You
didn't know I just had a baby, do you?"
"No, I didn't
see."
"Cannot bring younguns here. Don't pay to take care of my child.
My sister's taken care. Brings the child once a day out back the
cottage."
As I carefully played with her black hair, she rubbed
the back of my hands extending fingers to measure hand against
hand.
"You have large hands like Carla. Bet you have a big voice. I
hear that high-sounding churchgoing voice. You be a fine man some day. Sing
for Carla baby."
As I sang Carla brought me to the edge of desperation.
I had never felt such a pause, ache, or pressure to
release.
Immediately I felt this rush from the back of my skull, and
then two clinches, one release, and another throb, and I was at home in that
black mouth with "Ramar of the Jungle". I would never escape. When she was
done I climbed slowly down. I imagined her setting me down to
sleep.
Next morning I found the sash from her robe and wound it around
my hand. It had fallen between the pillows. Hiding it before Grandma came
home, I casually walked back into the kitchen.
Like changing a 45
record, Carla was almost back to normal. "Your grandma's out shopping," Carla
warned.
"You made Carla smile, last night. I don't know how you do it
but I did. God I did. I brought you your robe; you left it in my bathroom.
Tell nobody."
What my grandma called them, "nigger", had an
awful sound. I hated that word and never repeated it. I find it hard to
spell when I write it down to tell a story. I grew up that night in many
ways.
When I was a freshman at Columbia a year later, a black teenager
about my age smacked me alongside my head for what was nothing. I confused
him when I didn't hit him back.
He could see I wasn't afraid. I imagine
he wondered why I didn't fight back. I knew he wanted an excuse to hurt
me. Later I was angry with myself. It is also true that he barely grazed
my cheek with his fist.
More surprised than bruised, I didn't fully
understand why he was mad. I hadn't done anything to him. It was what they
call today a drive-by shooting -- that terrifying accident that just drops in
your lap.
In the end, you live and die like in 'Nam by your immediate
wits.
THE ADVENTURE
You might think I was obsessed with sex. I
was. That summer I knew the heat of the rain and the relief of a rocking
breast. There must be a connection between how the body and the mind
change.
Years later in Vietnam, when I learned that the code name for
the bombing of Vietnam by B-52s was "Operation Rolling Thunder" I looked up
at the sky and imagined the clouds as Fauve's wild beasts.
Perhaps
this is a bit of hyperbole, but I do remember that the clouds and heavy rain
marked my hands making them tremble, just like the show of a supple breast
or the sudden split of a vulva opening and closing like a morning glory.
No bomb bay door, but the fall from that space through the canopy seemed
endless until it struck.
In Texas the clouds merged from blue haze to
gray to umber to black. At times they appeared as a maze. Other times they
became a painting more Pollack than Monet.
Peace and that surge of
conflict razed the night to the day in a trembling of weather gone awry. It
seemed then, as it does now, that weather affects our tempers, makes us
more and sometimes less vulnerable to that hasty rage we assume when we are
feeling weak while others seem strong.
I would love to tell this to my
uncle Darrel. He probably would not accept any of it because I was not saved.
I believe our journeys together on the eddy saved my life. He showed me
another temper that was never violent.
There seems to be one observation
about families that extends beyond the diversity of culture. Boys
need righteous men to show them how to be men. That word righteous is more
powerful than the same word used by barnstorming preachers ravaging the saved
and the damned.
THE ARCHEOLOGIST OF SMUT 1959
The Doctor's
Daughters
Tyler, Texas: Wednesday, August 26, 1959
At sixteen, sex
was everywhere and anything, but I played innocent games. I had assorted
girlfriends who let me kiss and feel, but not much
more.
Intellectually, I imagined myself the archeologist of smut. I
read every medical book imaginable. I copied pictures of the variety of our
sexual parts. I framed with condoms and a cache of dirty pictures I found in
the New York City subway. I sought anything that would take away that
ache.
Starting with Peyton Place, I read the flea books, Victorian
Lovelace and Grove press. I considered Playboy tame.
Looking through
my mother's drawers one day home "sick" from school I found actual
photographs of my mother and father having sex.
They were not the
usual pinup shots.
Intellectually and visually, I was not the
innocent child. I was so full of sex I never stopped sharing it.
At
the club pool in Tyler that summer, I told shit against the fan jokes to the
boyfriends of my young adult cousins. I mortified them, and they told
my grandma, but little did they know that the whole time at the pool I
wandered near the ladders of the pool to spy a tit or a hidden
crease.
When I slept over at their house I would set up watch, waiting
for them to come home on dates. I would pretend to sleep and imagine touching
and undressing them as they made the front porch speak in the scrawl
of whispers and moans.
One very hot night my younger cousin held her
skirt up to her neck while she kissed this boy good night. I heard him
come in his pants. I did as well.
Watching them, I remember the religious
tract I had read in their fundamentalist church about the evils of
pre- martial sex. I thought at the time that I wanted to find it and read
it again. Not having any of my usual reading available, at least it was about
sex.
HOMESICK
Every Saturday I made my movie money mowing the
grass for my grandmother. Cooking in the Texas sun I felt the
heat swallow. That day when l cut the electric cord it coughed my heart
back. I felt frizzed. My grandmother was angry, but then laughed when she saw
I was not hurt.
Grandma was not like my Aunt Joan and Uncle Darrel.
She said she was saved in Jesus, but she had a more down home and relaxed
way of expressing it. While we passed time playing Canasta, we had farting
contests to see who could let the biggest one go.
That was a long time
ago. Now, many of the details of my Texas summers are vague except for two
teenage girls who lived next door to my grandmother. Allison was
fifteen and her sister Debra was thirteen.
Allison's breasts did not
compare to Carla's, but as she shifted back and forth on one foot and danced
off the porch into the breeze, she sang several times "out of a frog's
mouth." I felt like my hand was connected to her body. Later that night I
manipulated my fingers and felt the air. I wondered about the song and the
satisfied smile. I didn't realize she sensed I was watching. When she told
me later that she liked how I looked at her, not just then, but all summer, I
was embarrassed and never asked her what the frog's mouth meant.
Years
later I compared that one memory with the opening scene of Deep Throat, where
an older woman smoking a cigarette seduced the boy delivering the
groceries.
ALLISON, DEBRA AND JOHNNY
A week after I cut the
lawn mower cord the first time, I sliced the mower cord again in two places.
Grandma wasn't home. She had told me not to mow anymore. I did it because
I wanted to show her.
I cursed when I cut the cord like I heard this
old scoutmaster do when he almost chopped his foot off with an
axe.
I didn't know that Allison and Debra had watched my clumsy
grass-cutting antics from the porch of their house with an older neighborhood
guy, Johnny, who at seventeen seemed more a man.
Debra laughed and
eagerly climbed over the fence, vaulting it to ogle the shattered power cord.
Allison followed her sister but opened the gate. She was holding Johnny's
hand but dropped it and refused it back when she came close.
Debra
teased, but Allison asked Johnny to help me fix the cord.
I was
jealous of him until he had actually fixed it --not just doing it, but
showing me how, explaining what he had done.
He pushed, testing it. I
let him do half the yard before he quit. I had watched him drive his car too
fast around the corners jealous of his daredevil James Dean mask.
I
didn't take credit for fixing the cord. I told Grandma about what had
happened. She said Peter's boy Johnny is good for you. You need an older
brother. You don't have much of a father. I sure wished you lived down here
all the time, but your mother never let you and your dad is off chasing
skirts and getting drunk. I knew it was true, but I was surprised that she
had said it about her son.
Nothing more happened that day and Grandma
wasn't mad. Johnny seemed to have taken an interest and asked me to come
over and help him work on his '49 Chevy.
After a few days of grime and
grease, Johnny found out that I knew more about girls and how their bodies
worked than he did. He was surprised when I told him things he had known
and done. We were opposites. I was all theory and he was completely practice.
He also taught me more about cars than I ever knew about sex from
books.
Next week, when it was too hot to work in the afternoon, Johnny
confessed that he and Allison and Debra had done it together. I thought he
was bragging.
He told me he liked Debra more, because she was
fearless, but he needed another guy for Allison. "I know she's stuck-up,"
he said, but he asked if I would come with him next time. Adding at the end
that Allison thought I was cute.
He asked if I would help a buddy out,
treating me like I was almost a brother. Maybe Grandma was right. I
was sixteen and he was a much older seventeen. I suspect my hormones
hadn't quite caught up.
Next day, we knocked on the back door and the
maid let us in. The girls were giggling and the maid said, "I don't know
if I should do this, I have my afternoon off today, and I promised your
mama."
She gave in when Allison whispered in her ear.
Inside,
Johnny asked for a beer, and Allison sneaked one in from the kitchen and
later brought many others when the maid announced she was leaving. We drank
and Johnny smoked. The girls wore thin tee shirts and identical red short
shorts.
We didn't waste any time after that. Debra got the cards and
said, "The game is strip poker. Are you all in?"
Debra lost first.
Quickly, she pushed her pants down and up, more brazen than coy.
"What
a fucken tease," Johnny said. The real game had started.
After the
second hand, when I lost my tee shirt, Debra ran back towards what I assumed
was her bedroom.
When Debra came back she wore her mother's silk
nightgown and fancy high heel shoes and nothing else. She had
also expertly applied very dark red lipstick and eye makeup.
You could
see her slight chest and the dark hair of what Johnny constantly called pussy
but the shocking color of the lipstick made her seem
sophisticated.
Johnny laughed, but Allison, with more the tone
of parent, told her to stop acting like a baby.
Debra laughed and sat
down hard in Johnny's lap. When he kissed her Debra threw one leg up and you
could see everything.
Caught up in the craze, and feeling my second
beer, trying to keep up with Johnny, when I lost, I pulled my pants down
and up just as fast.
"Another fucken tease," Johnny said.
"Why do
you care if Henry's a tease, Johnny," Debra mocked kissing him and smearing
lipstick on his chest.
After the next hand, Johnny lost. He stepped out
of one leg of his tight jeans, and caught up in them, Debra pulled them
off his legs. She threw them across the room to make a statement.
I
lost my pants and underwear in two quick hands. Debra made Johnny and me
stand beside each other so she could measure us.
Taking out a tape
measure from the maid's sewing box, Debra and Allison, shy at first, pushed
us together so we touched. Debra wrapped the tape around them,
and playfully tied them into a bow. Having too much fun rolling and
unrolling the tape, she never reported the results. Her determination
reminded me of Carla.
Debra was not impressed with my size. She looked at
me close and laughed.
"Don't worry, it'll grow up," and she watched it
bounce when she pushed down in it.
Strange, but her attitude helped us
relax.
Losing another hand, I took my shirt off and was completely
naked.
Allison lost the next two. She pulled her shirt off
but hesitated about her bra.
I tried to imagine Allison completely
naked.
Johnny warned her not to chicken out.
Allison turned her
back but laughed. She didn't seem shy. She said she never took orders from
anyone especially boys.
"Take off your bra," Debra told Allison. "Show
them your knobs. Want me to help you?"
"Yes," turning her back, Debra
unsnapped Allison while Johnny and I watched. I have never seen anything
so beautiful as those perfect breasts.
"God, they are great," I said
too loud
Allison caught my almost shy glance and smiled.
Debra
said. "Give me a chance, but let me tell you about smarty pants
sister.
"Last month she walked outside in the back yard at 3
AM topless and ran up to Johnny's window in the garage where he slept. She
told me she just wanted to wake him up with her tits. He wasn't there but she
shook them anyway."
"I did not. She's making it up," Allison glared at
Debra.
"You did too." Debra said, louder.
After this interlude,
Allison refused to take her pants off, pulling them up when Debra tried to
make her take them off.
Johnny sitting next to Debra, but no longer
entwined, changed the mood again by playing with himself.
Watching him
go at it, nobody cared that Allison had chickened out. Debra grabbed Johnny.
Allison sat on the stool in front of him. We watched him unroll it as
he peeled back the head. His cock erect was different than mine. I knew a
few men who were not circumcised, but I had never seen one.
When I
asked about it, Debra said, "that's because he is not Jewish like you Henry.
All Jewish boys get circumcised, dummy."
"I am not Jewish. I am
Catholic," I whispered to myself. Nobody cared.
I looked closely at
Johnny's cock until he pulled it away asking if I was queer. I said of course
not, but that was not the first time I felt uncomfortable with the word
"queer."
Allison, noticing my distress kissed me, saying that
she didn't like people who called people names.
I have no idea why
Allison picked me that day, but I heard Debra say in the background to
Allison that it was "her turn."
Allison told Debra I like Henry much
more than I could ever like Johnny.
"I like him because he seems to
know a lot more than I do. He's smart," Allison told her sister nodding in
my direction.
I looked up at Allison and smiled and she,
embarrassed that I had heard, turned back to her sister and then suddenly
after a moment reached out with her hand.
When I heard her say that word
"smart," I was still frozen in place. I hesitated and she came over to
me putting her arm through mine and taking my hand we walked back to Debra
and Johnny and sat down as a couple. I felt as if I had broken Bannister's
four-minute mile.
NO MORE GAMES
We got dressed and undressed,
hugged and kissed, played cards, and I felt Allison's knobs, got increasingly
hard, pushed and prodded by Debra who managed to play with both Johnny and
I at the same time.
Allison screamed at her to let go of me, and she said
no, but did. I followed Johnny who was then looking closely, fervently at
those silken lips Debra had brazenly opened. She had sparse dark hair. That
was the first time I saw the black hole of a woman's sex. It drew me
inside.
Innocently, I said to Debra, "Is that your tickler"?
Debra
said that it was called "a clitoris" or a "clit". "If you must know. I rub it
every day so it gets big like the ones in my father's books."
I told
her I read the same books.
When I said that, Allison came up and leaned
over all of us, and whispered that she had one too, and if I would forget
about Debra's she would show me, hitting me with a small pillow and laughing
as we gathered inside a human hive.
The couples divided, moving almost
into separate rooms. The games were over.
Pulling Allison down, I
asked her to show me and she kept her promise.
It looked different
from the books but the same. I had not seen much of Carla as we were in the
dark.
Amazed I marveled to Allison how her petals opened as she pulled
the crease apart opening the pink center like layers of fluted waves. As I
rubbed the face of her sex, I explored myself.
Just as I stopped,
Allison squealed no and kissed me like I had never been kissed. I felt as if
I were held under water, but instead of fearing suffocation, I found
I could breathe by taking turns being active.
Carla had taught me a
few things, but I was a boy to her. With Allison like Carla sex engendered
play and tenderness.
Moving away from the window, Allison danced down
the hallway twirling. When she came back she held her own long flowing
nightgown, not one of her mother's.
It was silk but not like the
Fredericks of Hollywood catalogs I collected. It was not elaborate like the
one Debra had worn.
"I want to wear this," she said. "I want to be
special. I dreamed I would meet a boy I could share words."
Standing
there, three feet away, legs together, she looked like a Renoir painting and
not a lifeless drawing in an art or medical book. She did not resemble any
of the stick models in the Sears underwear catalogue.
Impatient and
unsure I moved towards her, but she backed away a step. "I really want to put
this on."
I helped her with the long top but she threw the panties on
the couch after a long stand up kiss. Stepping back from her for a second,
looking at her dark eyes, straight back, proud head and rare but beautiful
face, she was more elegant than any pinup model in a lingerie
catalog.
Looking me straight in the eyes, not away like before, she
asked without speaking, what we both wanted and sat down on this convertible
couch that she quickly had unfolded right before my eyes. That shocked me
more than I could say. Caught in my unspoken lie, I had no idea what to do
next. Expecting her to know, I felt uneasy. When I hesitated again, Allison
giggled when I told her the truth and said, "I don't know rightly either but
I like it so far."
I touched her slowly and tenderly instinctively
finding every pause and kiss between sighs; she suddenly pulled my hand
away.
"That feels too good," she said.
"I love the feel of your
skin under the silk."
"I might want too much. I can't do that."
I
kissed her silent, told her too quickly that we can do other
things.
Gathering her, I touched her belly, cupping her
mound, crooking a finger inside, like I had seen in those photos in my
mother's drawer.
I confessed that I had done something this summer that
I really liked.
Not understanding what I proposed, she kissed me
harder.
"We'll do it like the great books," she said. "I will be Emma
and you can be the Pierre or Sir Lawrence.
With that, we both heard Debra
and Johnny humping making rough noises.
"Would you do it like that,"
Allison asked without turning.
I didn't look and said nothing. I
kissed her and kept my promise.
Pulling her down to the floor, I
lifted her legs up and apart, and stood there wondering if I she would let
me kiss her there. Answering, Allison pulled me down by my shoulders,
resting my head on her belly.
"Please," she said.
I opened her
lips with my mouth. I licked away from her lips and teased with kisses,
finally letting my mouth push, I exposed the trembling. I did it with the
softest touch.
Allison pushed me back, shaking her head, stopping
my mouth, and said that it was too much, too hard. I softened but insisted
much more gently and with another kiss, she pushed my head harder into her
legs full, gasping, and at that moment when Allison pulled my hair
I pulled up and I watched for a moment Johnny with Debra like it was a
movie far away.
Allison's hands were in my ears, mouth, lips,
helping, guiding, shaking her head frantic, closing her eyes tighter and
then screaming when she started to roll under. I refused to let go. With a
final deep swallow Allison almost stopped breathing.
When I stopped,
thinking it was over, she pushed my head closer, "don't you, no, you
can't."
I returned until she pushed my head up to kiss me long and
tenderly, as she tasted herself on my mouth.
"Oh my," she
said.
Half an hour later, she rubbed the head of my cock
slowly memorizing the sculpture of the head when I asked what she
felt.
Fascinated at the end, I remember combing Allison's pubic hair
with my fingers. While I licked and touched she closed her eyes, but wouldn't
let me do what Johnny had done with Debra. I never asked her if she had done
it with Johnny.
"There's no time," she said.
I listened but
didn't immediately stop. I knew Allison liked how I had touched her soft
hair. As long as I accepted the boundary, she explored until we both got
up from the bed almost at the same time.
Folding the bed up I imagined
us later as adults. Perhaps we would be visiting as married children do
their parents.
SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL
At the door, Allison
said, "come back tomorrow, please."
I started to leave. Allison walked
back up the stairs into the house, showing the shift of her breasts as
she did all summer. Smiling back she let them rumble under that absolute
white tee shirt.
"Wait," she yelled.
I turned back, running back
halfway up the stairs, asking with my eyes if she would shake them
again.
"Don't go yet," she said.
"Shake them like you did for
Johnny."
Pulling her tee shirt off, standing by the front door, not
caring who saw, Allison shook them furiously, giggling while I almost fell
down the stairs.
"I saw it in a dirty movie," she said. "My daddy's
got one. I promised myself I would do that one day for a boy I really
liked."
With that she turned and was gone.
NEXT
MORNING
"We're going to Dallas today," Grandma said. "I just got a
call on a job. You'll get the plane for New Jersey there. I don't have time
to fuss with you. Say good-bye to your friends and be home by noon."
I
never got a chance to say goodbye to Allison. The maid handed me a note as
she smiled almost knowing too much.
"I am sorry about this morning. I had
to baby sit my nephew. Be here at 2 PM. Mother will be out all night with
Daddy in Dallas. Debra will be at the movies with Johnny. The maid is going
out. Come here and tell me a story you have never told anyone. I think I love
you. "
I wrote Allison from New Jersey. She told me she knew when she
saw my bike was not in the carport. We wrote letters weekly for almost a
year. I talked with her on the phone several times until my mother stopped
the expensive calls.
When I didn't go back to Tyler that next summer,
she wrote and told me she had a boy friend in the army and next year she
would attend Tulane.
I heard from my Uncle Darrel when I was a medic
in Vietnam that Allison was studying to be a doctor and had married a
local celebrity. He said it was published in all the papers. Your aunt
thought you might want to know. When Darrel mentioned in the letter how proud
he was of my patriotism, I felt empty but I cried.
That was more than
thirty years ago.
I have had many dreams about that missed afternoon.
What If I had kissed Allison good-bye or made love? Perhaps what we did
would not have matched the fantasy.
What if my mother had let me live
with my grandmother in Tyler? Would I have graduated from Columbia? Would I
have published poetry? Would I have been able to write this story that
Allison foretold?
Maybe I would have become a rich oilman or a cowboy
and broken my neck on a bucking Ford stock car. Maybe I would have died in
Vietnam.
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all
rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated. Copyright (c)
2000 Sean Farragher All Rights Reserved