My Redacted Life: Chapter Seven

The deadlines of April 1971 were approaching and I was in tall cotton, as they say down South. I was now making enough money to do. I still felt that I was four years behind classmates who had avoided the draft. I didn’t know it then, but I was approaching fast and would soon catch and surpass those who weren’t attorneys or physicians. I had stumbled into a career that paid well. But that would be a little later.

Right now, I was beginning to think about women. I mean thinking about women in a righteous and meaningful way.  Oh hell, who am I trying to kid? Any admirable thoughts were soon tainted by impure ones. I was just a man, after all.

A couple of factors kept me from acting upon these nefarious impulses. First, I wasn’t what you would call handsome. Second, whatever pleasantry there was about my looks was offset by the fact that I had gained 30 pounds when I quit smoking nearly three years earlier. The typical look I elicited from pretty women translated into, “Don’t even think about it, Jocko.”

So I went to work, went to movies, read, practiced the guitar and touch-typing with similar degrees of success, and drank beer with my buddies occasionally. Life was good, enhanced further by fact that no Bosun’s Mate Chief was taking his hangover out on me, and no oriental man, whom I would have otherwise liked better than most Americans I knew, was plotting to shoot me between my pretty green eyes.

I did manage to rake up enough courage to ask a woman in the office building for a date. She was physically quite attractive but, and this is probably the reason she proved available, a little on the thin side of the bookmark on the personality side.

I took her to a Mexican Restaurant for dinner, and she ordered an expensive “chef’s platter,” from which she proceed to take a couple of nibbles before laying her fork aside. When I asked if she didn’t like it, her response was, “Oh, I had already eaten something before you come (yes ‘come’) but my Momma always told me if a man took you out, to order the most expensive thing on the menu and that way you could tell how intersted (yes, ‘intersted’) he was in you.”

Needless to say, I wasn’t that “intersted,” so it was back to my books, guitar, and touch typing.

At work, I was working on my technical writing and encouraging the staff to hustle. We were all expecting a bit of a bonus if we met the deadlines and we responded accordingly. After all, greed is just a gussied-up bull whip.

At my home place, Sainted Mother was getting more and more displeased with the fact that I wasn’t driving down to see her every weekend. She simply couldn’t imagine what allure Little Rock had that could keep me away from her. I don’t think she had ever considered concepts such as sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

Of course I had no access to most of those, but Barkis "was willing, if unsteady”, as the man said when he first stepped ashore from a long sea voyage.

Two facts faced me, and they would combine to form my personal destiny. One, my apartment would have no air-conditioning when summer (just around the corner) came. Two, they were planning to demolish the building soon, so purchasing my own AC unit, as some tenants had done, wasn’t the soundest investment in the village.

I contemplated these things in the solitude of the evening while, 30 miles away, that cute little redhead kissed her boyfriend goodnight and went home to study.

Still befuddled