The Classics Illustrated comics ordered earlier that summer arrived in three installments (I believe some issues were on back order), so the house was cluttered with stuff for me to read. My parents also purchased a set of Standard encyclopedias from some guy who worked with them at Freddie’s. Like many people who worked at the restaurant, the guy was in the Navy and had duty elsewhere, so he was selling off all the loose ends. As part of the deal he also threw in a stack of Playboys. Thank you, God! I fell in love many times over.
About midsummer, the gentleman who lived behind us suggested I meet his grandson. Sure. The neighbor introduced us and we started to hang out and toss baseball and stuff like that. He was a couple of years and grades behind me, but was a pretty good kid. I introduced him to Pig and she paid him to work with me in her flower garden. He wasn’t really interested in comics or model planes, and I never asked him about Playboys, so tossing a baseball was pretty much it.
One day he invited me to his house for lunch and to play and whatnot. The kid met me in my backyard at the appointed time. We walked down a couple of blocks and into a slightly more isolated neighbor then cut through several backyards and finally penetrated a wooded boundary into the kid’s backyard. About thirty yards from the tree line and a little way downhill from the house was a beautiful, blonde woman hanging up laundry. Every time she bent forward to pick a piece to hang her blouse collar hung loosely enough to expose her breasts (she wasn’t wearing a bra) quite convincingly. That heavenly vision nearly stopped me in my tracks. “Hey mom,” the kid said. Mom? Christ, she looked like one of the Playboy girls. It was all I could do to avoid hyperventilation. She had platinum blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfect body. The clincher: She had an Elke Sommer accent. Yeah, all that and she was a Swede. Sveet.
Summer dripped away and I returned to Madisonville. It was like going back in time. Everything slowed to a crawl. I always felt, or at least acted like I felt, world weary, like my mere existence was existential bravery in the face of all odds. I hated looking so plastic and unfashionable in my shiny new school duds and worked hard to knock the store bought smell off em. I wore out the toes of my shoes in no time flat. I dipped my comb in Vaseline Jelly and greased the shit outta my hair. I wore rings, yes, even girl’s rings, for the damage they might do if I got into a fight. I’m sure I looked like I was asking for one.
Other than that, everything went back to the way it had been, and it pretty much stayed that way. Repetitions of the same old routine as the year before and the year to come swept me along. Music was really secondary to television, especially science fiction movies, though I heard some great stuff on Tarzan soundtracks. I regularly watched Sing Along With Mitch, The Dean Martin Show, Hullabaloo, The Andy Williams Show, and The Danny Kaye show, and of course the Saturday country shows continued.
I went back to Norfolk one last time. It was sort of a bust. We lived in a shitty location in a small upstairs apartment. The owner’s dog hated me and once bit me. My parents did not try to bribe me because they had in their minds returning to Madisonville, and they eventually did. To me the years of 1964 through 1966 were nothing but mushy simulations of the past. I really needed something new, and when the gasoline is ready the fire will come. O youth!
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