Shame, oh shame. Where art thou?

Carol Lynley died this week. Not many people paid notice. That’s what happens many times to former film stars who gained fame in their youth and saw it fade away. It seems the press best remembered her for most for her sexy role in The Poseidon Adventure. Lots of people my age remember her as the co-star, with Brandon deWilde, in the 1959 film Blue Denim.

Yes, that’s the one where a bit of fooling around in the basement by a teen-aged couple led to an unforeseen pregnancy. What was the impact on the largely youthful audience that flocked to see it? Depends on who you ask.

The film evolved from the 1958 Broadway play by writer James Leo Herlihy. The play told the story a bit differently from the film version. In the play, the young protagonist obtained an abortion. Of course, movie censors of that time wouldn’t hear of that. The film showed the chastened and frightened couple boarding a bus to a secret location to face marriage, parenthood and the future.

Again, what impact did the film have on young folks? I’ve read where some young girls thought it was sexy. I don’t know. I know, from memory, that it scared the hell out of some of the boys. “What, me pay a price? I had nothing to do with it. Why screw up my life?” That male attitude probably wasn’t as strong in 1959 as it is now, but we see that the idea of males having no responsibility, no price to pay, no shame, and no retribution to face in the case of unwanted pregnancies has been with us for a long while. The attitude has gained a systemic and formidable position in American society. It will not, “… go gentle into that good night.”

Funny thing is, I don’t remember the causal act to be that sexy in the film. Bear in mind, though, that I last viewed it some years ago. In the key scene, all of the boy’s buddies have left the basement and the (uninvited) young girl remains to joke around a bit. In the next scene, he finds her in the library with a medical book turned to the pregnancy section. That leads to the most memorable line in the film.

“It doesn’t say how to stop it,” she says, with tears in eyes that stare into a bewildered face.

For a bit of bad-taste trivia, I’ve read that In Cold Blood murder victim Nancy Clutter wanted to see the film but never got to.

Why bring it up? I don’t know. It did represent a morality play of sorts. The young couple suffered from a life interrupted. We don’t know though, what might have happened. The marriage might have flourished and the boy might have grown to be a stock fund manager. On the other hand, he might have earned a spot on the black granite wall in Washington, “leaving a wife and child behind,” as they say. Or, it may have dawned on him that he could walk away scot-free and he did.

I heard a comedian say something yesterday to the tune of “shame is the first step to restoration.” I don’t know why so much truth about our national salvation is coming from comedians these days, but it is.

Shame. If that film generated a dread of shame in a few young children, I suppose it served a good purpose. I’m not sure that was endemic, though. There still remains the legend of a slightly older contemporary “rich kid” in my home town. After impregnating his girlfriend, he dutifully showed up at the wedding, played his role, and then drove the bride to her parents’ house and deposited her like a prom-night date, never to be bothered with “husband-hood,” or fatherhood, again.

Then there was a closer acquaintance who, at last count, had fathered two children from separate girls, never paying a price, due to the blessings of his parents’ money. Ironically, he became one of our strongest opponents of a girl’s making the “wrong choice” in such dilemmas. Yes. We live in a strange world.

Oh, and Miss Lynely? A short while after setting the young men of America mentally aflame with her role in The Poseidon Adventure, she did a nude gig in Playboy Magazine. We have no record of the counterbalancing number of “Honey, guess what?” surprises that act may have generated.

Life goes on. Maybe Brother Hunter S. Thompson was right. “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.” 

My Redacted Life: Sunday Break

About that time, in 1972, I decided to change my image. I thought, for some strange reason, I should drive a sports car.

Since I had seen the movie Goldfinger, I had longed to drive a flashy sports car. I could just see me as James Bond driving around Little Rock with some beautiful and sexy woman, her long hair wafting gently in the wind and her hand on my shoulder, her hazel eyes staring at me, thinking impure thoughts.

I had done some trading and saved some money and began to look around. I soon found that an Aston Martin would stretch my budget a little too much, so I expanded my search.

Now while I am searching, please allow me to insert some information. I had overlooked, it seems, or had at least neglected to plan properly—an oddity for someone in my profession—for some contingent facts.

One, a man six feet tall and weighing 230 pounds, when spooned into a sports car, was going to resemble a bullfrog crammed into a sewing thimble bouncing down the road to the amusement of everyone he met.

Second, beautiful, sexy women, with long flowing hair, particularly redheads, didn’t care much for riding around in a sports car with the top off.

Third, with the sole exception of riding a motorcycle, speeding down the highway in a sports car represents the surest method on record of meeting a fiery death, a fact impressed on one by each 18-wheeler zooming past at “90-per,” the driver only vaguely aware of another “highway bug” that needed to be squashed.

Hot damn, Bubba!

Fourth, I was no Sean Connery. Beautiful women with impure thoughts were much more prevalent in the movies than in real life, sports car or no sports car.

Still, I managed to find a little green model that fit my budget. In fact, the salesman seemed quite relieved to knock a few extra bucks off the price for me. It was the ill-fated and much maligned Porsche 914 (the “Volkswagen-Porsche”) and he wanted, I’m sure, to get it off the same lot as his real Porsche and fancy Mercedes showpieces.

I loved it though. Elvis didn't drive his first Cadillac home with more pride than I did my little green angel. Further, and more importantly, it was to do the trick, as Faithful Reader will see.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 17 (Cont._2)

School was out. Teachers were off for the summer. The Redhead would be around the apartment a lot I supposed, although she had evidenced no interest that I might be. All I knew about her feelings was a haughty “in your dreams, sucker,” look that she delivered so well.

I worked on the final stages of the Hope grant application, the place where nothing seemed to fit and things were always missing. As I struggled with this, amidst much swearing, a talent honed during my four years as “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” the company prepared to go into the land development business. A bank had helped procure an option on a nice tract of land between two growing cities and Jack Castin had worked his magic in designing a wonderful modern subdivision.

Watching Jack work was as treat in itself. He was left-handed, in fact he once held the left-hand golf championship title for the State of Oklahoma. He would take pen in hand and, with great flowing arcs, streets and lots would appear, along with landscaped areas. Soon, a wonderful image peered back from what had been a blank sheet.

The women in the office thought he was wonderful as well. Drawing too many stares, and with such talent, he sailed unsuspecting into a sea of jealousy that was bound to erupt later. Stay tuned.

As for me, I had to go out of town to gather some data. That didn’t make my socks roll up and down, as they say. I imagined all sorts of things: parties to which I wouldn’t have been invited; my Redhead leaving on a date with a big tall basketball coach, her arm in his and her head resting lovingly on his shoulder, those wonderful eyes peering up adoringly from a circle of red hair; or an engagement notice in the paper.

I thought maybe I’d better forget about it and concentrate on what I was doing. The company wasn’t paying me to moon over a girl that had already promised herself to some fool. They were paying me to photograph wonderful old buildings, slated to be demolished in the name of progress. I was righteous, after all.

One evening after I finished the day’s work, I did drive to Texarkana, Texas and look up my old friends Gary and Dianna Toler. I found them living in a converted chicken house behind Dianna’s childhood home with a young daughter.

We visited and they sang for me, not the old songs, though. After several drug-filled adventures that had led them hitchhiking to New York City—where Gary had almost sold a song—and back, they had gotten into religion, the one where you go around knocking on doors on Saturday. They claimed it had saved their lives, recommending it highly. It had led to a child and a stable home, albeit a chicken house. It changed their music, and not necessarily for the worse. We got along fine, a good diversion from my miseries.

Talking to Toler always helped
to ease my troubled mind.

Seeing how content they were, I decided “to hell with the Redhead.” She may have gotten married while I was gone. Good enough for her. She could just go on learning the difference between a foul shot and a layup. I didn’t care if she chose bleacher-splinters over fun and excitement, her loss, not mine.

I pulled into the apartment building’s parking lot after dark when I arrived home. I grabbed my old sea bag full of dirty clothes from the car and started to my apartment. My neighbor stood behind her screen door watching me.

For a moment, I didn’t think she was wearing anything at all. I averted my gaze and headed for my door.

“Hey sailor.” Her voice caught me. Oh well, one little look wouldn’t hurt. Besides, both my affections and my attention were free to roam now.

I looked.

She wasn’t fully exposed. She wore her faithful peignoir. The backlighting had produced the initial effect. I tried to look her directly in the eyes. Gravity fought me like a demon.

“You just missed her.”

My heart succumbed to gravity as well.

“She asked about you.”

Gravity dissipated.

“Oh? Who?”

That laugh and that wink. “She said she hadn’t had anyone stare at her hind-end all week.”

“Oh,” I said, “you mean your sister’s friend.”

“No, I meant the Queen of England,” she said, then added, “You’ve really got a case of it, don’t you?”

“How old is she?”

How old is she? Couldn’t I have thought of anything more stupid to say?

“Old enough,” she said, laughing. “Take it from your friend here. Old enough.” She turned to close the door. The combination of light and sheerness of material gave me a quick glimpse of what I thought Heaven must be like. “Good night,” she said. “Sleep tight.”

I turned to my own door, thinking, “I’m not in Vietnam anymore.”

My Redacted Life: Chapter Nine (Cont._2)

As 1971progressed at the consulting firms, life became somewhat normal. I recall some interesting vignettes, but the telling of them wouldn’t past the Political Correctness Police today.

For example, the assistant drafter was a quite attractive woman with a knockout figure and a bit of a strange sense of humor. She was the kind of woman who, when she walked past a man on the sidewalk, would cause him to seem to remember something he had forgotten, swivel about, and stare at her until she moved out of sight, just imagining things. She knew it too, and wasn’t above adding a little extra “sway and strut” at such times to spice up the torment.

Pantsuits were then a popular attire for women in the marketplace, having only recently been approved by a hegemonic male power structure. The drafter had a beautiful black one suitable for both the workplace and a funeral parlor visitation. She wore it periodically and looked sharp in it.

Sometimes, though, the head drafter would take an opportunity to give her a hard time over some detail or other. You could then set your watch.

Next day, the assistant would waltz into the drafting room wearing the top of the pantsuit as a mini-skirt. That day would not be one suitable for precise work demanding a steady hand at the drafting pen, or whatever. The head drafter would spend the day babbling and trying to stop his hand from shaking. And the outfit lost its appropriateness for the funeral parlor. One look and the deceased, if male, would surely arise from the dead.

As I say, she had a strange sense of humor. Other times, she appeared on the verge of tears. When I asked her one such day if something was the matter, her eyes filled and she informed me that her husband had left the day before for his two-week summer outing with the state’s national guard.

When I, apparently, failed to show the proper degree of commiseration, she informed me that I had no idea what it was like to have a loved one away in the military.

I nodded understanding and we never broached the subject again. In fact, we got on very well. Once, she even accompanied me to a “Happy Hour” movie: McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It turned out that Warren Beatty, even though just on screen, had the power to give her a real case of the vapors. Since Julie Christie caused a concomitant male effect on me, we were well-suited for the outing.

As the movie progressed, and some horrific scenes (by the standards of that time) began to flash, she would grab my hand and hold it.

As Sainted Mother would have put it, that just scared the “pure-dee” hell out of me. We both forgot it, I suppose, as the ending credits began to roll, but I never invited her to the movies again.

When I related the experience to my friend Jackie, from down the street, she snorted, laughed, and winked. Then she said, “You’re a goddam naïve fool, but I’ll be your friend anyway.” Then she began to sing in her wonderfully melodic voice, “I feel the earth move under my feet.”

I was beginning to discover that life was more complicated out in the free world. 

             

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

Growing Up Southern: December 28, 2017

It wasn’t that Miss Thorton didn’t trust 13-year-old boys. Well, actually it was because Miss Thorton didn’t trust 13-year-old boys. She’d seen enough of them in her day. It had been, after all, nearly 20 years since that promising day that she had stood with the roll of paper in her hand proclaiming her a graduate of our state teacher’s college.

So much promise, promise that would be soiled by years of disappointments, rejections, bypasses, and dreams unfulfilled. Unmarried, unrecognized, un-promoted, and uninspired, she found herself relegated to “teaching” Study Hall. Gone were the dreams of filling young minds with the glories of poetry and great novels. There was little chance now, it seemed, that she would be remembered as anyone’s inspiration, only as the one who could spot two students passing notes in the farthest corner of her kingdom, and, it was rumored, could spot the smell of a “Corn Nut” from a hundred feet away.

There was only one reward for her assignment. That reward was the provision of ample time to reflect upon the perfidious nature of young boys, those vile, scheming, lascivious creature who comprised half of her care. Oh, they were base and evil. “See,” she would think to herself, “how sweetly the young girls attend their maidenly duties and prepare themselves for life.” The thought that she had once sat in this very room in such preparation and that her efforts failed, epically, never entered her mind.

She was, after all, better off than the teachers at the “colored” school who taught with hand-me-down textbooks for half her meager salary. And, she reflected, she had never given birth to anything as vile as a boy.

“Boys,” she would think, whose need for punishment was the sine qua non of her life. She operated under the assumption that they—the boys—were permanently and assiduously up to no good. With this as a guide, and with sharp eyes, she had exposed many a pernicious plot. Concomitantly, she had relegated, she didn’t know how many, promising lads to a life of shame-showered repentance.

It was her only joy, as I have intimated.

Her attention on this day focused on two of the worst. They were the worst for two reasons. First, they were sharp and cunning, evil beyond their years. Second, she had been, so far, unable to catch them at anything more deleterious than drawing pictures of jet planes strafing Chinese soldiers. Even then, Mr, Caruthers, the principal, had refused to punish such pernicious behavior to the degree she deemed appropriate. “Probably,” she thought, “he had been guilty of a similar crime, only with Nazis and Japs for targets.”

The day, she fumed when she saw the first of the pair leave his seat and squirm his way to her desk. Reaching her, his beady eyes narrowed, and deceit oozed from them like sewage from a cracked pipe.

“May I go to the library?”

The library? A lifelong drunk couldn’t have asked directions to a temperance hall and sounded anymore incongruous. “For what purpose?”

“Gotta do a paper.” His eyes turned dirty yellow, a sure sign of mendacity.

“Don’t you think you might need to take notes?”

The miscreant looked at his empty hands and his mind made a calculation that would have impressed Isaac Newton. “Yessum,” he said and marched back to his desk, to return a few minutes later, flashing the cover of a “Big Chief.” When he passed the desk of his partner-in-crime, the teacher had detected a sly signal that would have impressed the most adroit Soviet spy.

He was soon off, followed by his evil twin, to engage in whatever bit of mischief they had devised.

Today, though, they weren’t the only ones with a plan. Miss Thornton was harboring her own. She beckoned toward Rita Mae Collingsworth, the richest and most despised girl in class, a tandem that made her a most excellent temporary monitor. “I’ll be right back,” she said after seating the young girl on “The Throne of Temporary Authority,” as the other kids called it.

Miss Thornton entered the library and motioned the Librarian for silence. She then sleazed near, holding up two fingers with a questioning look. The Librarian, a world-class whisperer, said, “In the magazine section.” She added, “I’ll swear, I think those boys have a real interest in geography.” She started to add a laudatory coda, but Miss Thornton had left the scene.

She approached the nook containing magazines with the prowess of an Apache. She stopped before turning into it and strained her ears. Ah, she could hear perfectly.

“Look at this one,” a voice said.

“Gollee,” another voice said, adding, “Do white women’s look like that?”

“Boogie Shannon says they do.”

“None of them look the same. Wonder why?”

“Just the way the lord made them, I reckon.”

“I wonder why they don’t take pictures of white women like this?”

“I guess they let them do it in Africa but nowhere else.”

“Man, that’s something.”

“Gollee. Turn the page.”

That was enough. She sprang. The scene was all she had suspected: two sets of eyes as large as coffee saucers, two faces strained with terror, and an open copy of a National Geographic,

The eyes belonged to Kenny Gardner and me, and the ordeal that lay ahead of us would have made Tomás de Torquemada shake his head in awe and admiration. I believe, to this day, that it’s the reason Kenny never played for the NFL, and I’m not a cultural anthropologist with a Nobel Prize under my belt.

Oh, and Miss Thornton never got married.

Morning Thoughts

Someone posted a query on-line the other day as to whether listening to an audio version of a book constituted “reading” it. I have to submit my opinion as “yes.” Having chosen a profession that involves heavy travel, I’ve “read” many a work that way, first on tape, then on CD, and now downloaded onto my cell phone. A sample of the works I’ve read include Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the condensed version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a number of Bill Bryson’s works, Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, and most of the published books of the late Stephen Jay Gould. Some read better than others. Some carry more impact. For example, I found myself pulling into parking lots and delaying my arrival home in order to hear more of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.

Fiction can prove tricky, for it becomes more and more obvious the extent to which modern writers violate the last of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing.” It recommends, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” It was easy to skip over superfluous jibber-jabber with tapes. One only had to punch the “forward” button as many times as necessary. With CDs, one had to skip tracks. Now, with downloaded audio, one loses entire chapters. It’s easier to tolerate the junk.

Worst, in modern fiction, are the ubiquitous and gratuitous sex-scenes. Dear me, in today’s America, anyone over the age of six is perfectly aware of what happens when two people succumb to the uncontrollable urges that the Apostle Paul warned about in First Corinthians. They occurred, he said, sometimes as a result of drinking the communion wine, but more often as a simple weakness to be avoided at all costs until the end of time, which was right around corner, a few months at most. Any righteous soul should be able to keep it zipped up that long and avoid the indecencies involved in the act, not to mention the eternal consequencies.

Oops, I’ve gotten off-track.

Facts are, there just isn’t much we can add in describing the act by now that isn’t portrayed nightly on TV. But we still try. I once had to endure a mystery novel’s sex scene that lasted from downtown Jonesboro, AR to well past Walnut Ridge, even with constant fast-forwarding past the most unseemly actions. Trust me, the description covered it all, and left one both exhausted and laboring under the strong belief that the two folks involved were each in desperate need of a hobby, one that didn’t involve a member of the opposite sex.

These days, I’m afraid, at least one sex scene looms as essential in a modern novel as the 58-minute car chase looms in modern movies. It wasn’t always that way. Consider the masters, the ones we really should be reading anyway. Here’s how Joseph Conrad described what we might call “The Grand Finale:”

“He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side. Before she could make a movement, or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness—a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone —a command which Heyst did not obey.”

That’s from “Victory,” and no, I don’t think the scene spawned the name of the book.

But wasn’t it sublime? I don’t believe that even the Apostle himself would have begrudged that little bit of hanky-panky.

How this could lead to some of the
 scenes I've read is the true mystery.