When I was in high school, I played the part of the Stage Manager in the play Our Town. Thank God I didn’t have to memorize the lines because there are a couple thousand of them. The drama coach photocopied all my lines and put them in a three ring binder and told me to read the lines “with feeling.” You remember the Stage Manager, don’t you? He was a wise, Hal Holbrook kind of guy, evocative, given to poetic musings about mountains and life and such. I was a junior at the time of the play, and remarkably enough, I had a girlfriend named Jamie, who played the part of Emily. Ah, poor, tragic Emily: Pretty, young, and dead from childbirth with the best line in the whole play about how nobody really appreciates life while they’re living it. Our Town is a terrific play, and I can still see Mount Monadnock in my imagination, vague and purple on the distant horizon.
Given our starring roles, you might think that Jamie and I were a powerhouse couple in the theater world of East Norton High, but we were really just a couple of bored kids who were easily coaxed out of the ennui of our rural half-existence. Jamie had blue eyes and bangs, and she wore blue eyeshadow and mauve lipstick. It was Jamie who taught me how to kiss. I’ll never forget our first date and my first lesson. She pulled back from my initial attempt and said, “Make your lips soft and stick out your tongue.” Well, I had no idea that’s how it was done, but I tried it anyhow, and all I can say is, boinggg. Back in those days, we would go to the drive-in picture show in Neosho and steam up the windows while some flick no one ever heard of created an enormous window in the once unconquerable night, a Technicolor portal out of our half-existence into the void. By 1968 the Hays Code had collapsed, and girls in movies were pulling their blouses over their heads with increasing frequency. As it was on the big screen so it was in every car, world without end, amen.
Back to Our Town. What happens is that Emily (aka Jamie) and a fellow named George (aka nobody worth remembering) fall in love, and he proposes and she accepts, and then they stand center stage and kiss while the Stage Manager warbles on and on about marriage. Meanwhile, the kids in the audience began tittering because they had never seen two people kiss that long on stage, much less two of their own classmates, not to mention the fact that Emily and George’s cheeks were undulating like they were sucking on either end of a live trout, and suddenly, I realized that while I was reading from a three ring binder, I was being cuckolded (or some version of cuckolded) in front of the whole damn school while my girlfriend taught some nonentity how to kiss—at center-stage, mind you!—as I droned on about marriage and kids and “till death do us part.” My interminable speech concluded, “Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.” Well, let me tell you, this was one time the kids in East Norton High were interested because of my up close and very public humiliation. I became the butt of many jokes.
“That’s it,” I decided, “I’ll show the world of womanhood, by God. I will be a hardened (no pun intended) user of girls and pursue my own pleasure with no qualms, commitments, or illusions.” But that didn’t work out either. After Jamie left me for George, there were no more takers in East Norton High. I was alone with a few dirty magazines and my buddies. So, you can understand why preaching as a vocation appealed to me so much: Girls finally paid some attention to me, which is why I fell so quickly from holy to folly to phony baloney.
Now, back to Rose. You remember Rose, don’t you? Eschatology . . . scooching closer . . . attic . . . Lily . . . black snake? Her enthusiasm for sex was infectious (but not literally, thank goodness). She was not reluctant to “do things”; no, sir, she did ‘em with gusto, unabashedly and without shame. She enjoyed pulling her blouse over her head. She liked leading me into a bedroom while I shuffled along with my pants around my ankles. She encouraged me with hot and nasty words breathed into my ear. She was eager to fornicate, and that was something I hadn’t experienced before. So, of course, after she went back to college, I became obsessed with her memory. Long restless nights alone in my musty bedroom followed with cold showers and much Bible reading and an increase in pastoral fervor. Rose possessed entirely the dark center of my imagination, and I remembered with desperate longing her musky funk and the palpitating aftermath.
But then—uh-oh—I imagined her doing those same things with frat boys and football players and prom kings from Alabama. The darkness overcame the light, and I succumbed to a frenzy of lust and jealousy and insomnia. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I called Rose and told her I was coming to visit. After a long pause, she said, “Sure, if you want to. I’m busy with studies and my sorority, but okay.” Not exactly the enthusiasm she had previously demonstrated but enough encouragement to set me in motion.
As I began preparing for the trip, however, I realized I had a problem, well, several problems. One problem was that I had no idea what college life was like, so I wasn’t sure how to act. Or dress. Or speak. I had never even visited a college, and movies about colleges, even state colleges, made them seem pretty high-falutin’. Remember this episode happened in 1969 when colleges still bore an aura of wisdom and respectability.
My second problem was that Lily took my truck when she divorced me, and all I could afford as a replacement was a ‘61 Corvair that was always in the shop. That jalopy would never make the trip from Missouri to North Carolina, and I figured arriving in a Greyhound bus would fail to make the impression I wanted. I needed a decent car.
My third problem was a deep-rooted anxiety. What if Rose didn’t like me that much after all? What if I was just a distraction when she came to visit her grandparents? And what if she put out as eagerly with the guys at Chapel Hill as she had with me? What made me think I was so special? Nevertheless, I was determined to get my hands on my “Holy Roller party gal,” so I called my buddy from high school, J.W. Squires, who was still at Mizzou and explained my situation. He asked me how long I planned to be there, and I said, “Maybe three days,” so he said, “I could take off for that long. When do you want to go?” and I suggested, “Next week?” He said, “Okay. What’s your address?,” and I said, “I’m back over the Rocky Comfort general store,” and he said, “See you on Tuesday.” So it was that a week later J.W. and I were on the road to North Carolina to see Rose.
It did not go well. You may remember from blog post seven that J.W. had been equipped by his father to have everything necessary to enjoy his college experience. A red Camaro. A monthly stipend. Condoms. And as if that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of J.W.’s junior year, his father bought him a brand new ‘69 powder blue Corvette Stingray. He clapped J.W. on the back and said, “That ought to see you through the next couple of years.” Lucky guy, that J.W. (I never told J.W. that his dad had made a pass at me.) And even though it was December with a high of forty degrees, J.W. insisted we drive with the top down. Show off. Holy hell, it was cold! By the time, we pulled up in front of the Kappa Kappa Gamma house, my head was pounding, and I was coughing, and my eyes were watering, and my nose was clogged. Before he turned off the car, J.W. revved the engine a couple of time, and as if by magic, the windows of the house filled with the faces of sorority girls. We had just climbed out when Rose came skipping down the steps. She gave me a peck on the cheek and asked, “Who’s your friend?”
“Hid name is J.W.”
“Is that his car?”
“Yed.”
Rose skipped around the car and took both his hands in hers. Laughingly, she said, “I’m Rose.”
In mock gallantry, J.W. held her right hand to his lips and kissed it. He said, “I’ve heard such wonderful things about you.”
And she said, “What have you heard?”
“That you are the fairest of them all.”
“Is that all you heard?”
J.W. lowered his voice, “What else do I need to know?”
And she said, “C’mon; I’ll show you.”
With that, J.W. grabbed his suitcase from the backseat of the car, and I watched the two of them walk up the sidewalk, onto the porch, and into the house. I stood by the beautiful car that wasn’t mine and felt more miserable than I had ever felt before, even more miserable than I did after Jamie embarrassed me in front of everybody. The fever was coming on, and I coughed a series of wracking spasms and thought, “What do I do now?” So, I dragged my duffel bag from the car and made my way up the sidewalk. A black woman met me in the foyer and asked me what I wanted, and I started to cry, I felt so bad. She led me to a small room off the kitchen and said, “This is where the boys sleep it off from time to time. I don’t tell the house mother neither.” For the next three days I lay on a one mattress cot and writhed and moaned, and the lady brought me soup and hot tea, but I never caught a glimpse of Rose or J.W. the whole time I was there. On the morning of the fourth day, J.W. cracked the door and said, “Hey, we need to go. I have a test on Monday I need to study for.”
I said, “You are one low-down son of a bitch, you know that?”
“Ah,” he said. “Don’t take it so hard. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”
“I hate you.”
“You might want to save that until after I drive you all the way back to Missouri. Unless you have a better way of getting home in which case . . .”
“Shut the hell up.” I sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed my fingers through my hair. “Okay, I’m going.” I pulled on the same clothes I had arrived in and threw my underwear and toiletries in the duffel bag.
J.W. said, “That’s the spirit. I’ll be waiting in the car.”
I hugged the black lady and walked through the parlor to the foyer. Before I left, I looked behind me in time to see Rose skipping up the winding staircase, and I wondered, not for the last time, Why are some girls so mean to me? What am I doing wrong?
That was the question.