Friday, March 9, 2012

March 9, 2012

To this day I don’t know that I could say just what prompted Orlando to offer this heartwarming gesture to a lonely boy; Louise was very polite but she also made it very clear that she had not stepped out onto the patio to see if I needed more ice water. I wish I could tell you that I sized this up immediately, but I was still thinking of the bunch at the bar as secretaries on break. I didn’t really understand, until later after talking with Dad about the evening, the differences between prostitutes and call girls, and it was into this latter category that Louise and the other regulars at Orlando’s haven placed themselves. Now, for many folks, we may be talking about a distinction without a difference, but the status worth of that distinction was important to these young women. In passing, I might note that of a weekend, from time to time, one could spot Mr. Lynn, who ran a modeling agency in Shreveport, Mr. Lynn’s International Models, as he often frequented the Shreve’s Landing Club with those of his models who were of age. On those occasions, the bar was quite a pleasant place to find oneself, what with Mr. Lynn’s girls and Orlando’s aggregation all at work, and there was much coming and going out of and into the night.

Back on the patio, I was flummoxed. I wanted to take Louise up on what I finally understand was her suggestion that I finish my dinner and then come with her to her apartment from which she would deliver me safe and sound, perhaps sounder, to my folks’ house in the morning, before they got home. There was just one problem; I was scared to death. Even now I cringe trying to imagine what I finally managed to say to her that got me out of the spot I was in.  Don’t ask me if I now wish I had just let Louise call the shots that night; of course I do. I’m not really sure what it was that I was afraid of, but it was something like “unintended consequences.” Not venereal disease; I hardly knew what that was (those were?). No, it was that which we were all acculturated to fear the most, pregnancy. I know, I know; this lady was a professional, or at least a ranked amateur, but that certainly wasn’t clear to me at that very moment. All I could think of was my visit home the previous Thanksgiving and the present my old girlfriend Charlotte offered me.

Charlotte was one of the two Mormon girls with whom I had “gone steady” the first half of my senior year in high school. If you are very young, you might not know about going steady. Like a lot of social ritual among adolescents in the 1950s, it was child’s enactment of an adult’s privilege. In this case, the ritual aped marriage. I say “aped” not just because going steady tried to imitate the domesticity of the households we saw around us, with that placid intimacy’s promise of passion sometime later, dear, but because we boys were not much less brutish than our primate cousins, truth be told. If we had only known about the Bonobos, maybe we wouldn’t have been so desperately male about it all. The deal was that the boy would give his girl a ring, which she would wear on a chain around her neck or, and this seemed to be favored by girls who went with athletes, she would wrap tape around the narrower part of the band and wear it on her marriage finger. This sign meant “keep away,” “watch your language around her,” ““we can make out whenever we want to,” and everyone wanted to believe it stood for the kind of long-term commitment that was only a prologue to marriage and real sex.

Real sex was at a premium in the 50s in Shreveport. This was before the pill, before the second wave of the feminist movement, before the sexual revolution, just on the emerging cusp of rock ‘n’ roll’s tsunami (I started high school the year Bill Haley released “Rock Around the Clock”). As far as I could tell, most of the boys wanted to have sex and none of the girls did, with one or two exceptions. These exceptional girls had a hard row to hoe because while they “had” what all the boys wanted, none of the boys were supposed to want it from them. The whole point of our adolescence was a sort of involuntary but rigidly enforced delayed gratification, words that appeared on no vocabulary test we had ever taken but which stood for adult assumptions which were making our lives miserable. So, we pined and moaned over the sex we weren’t having with the girls who only wanted to go steady with us and were at a loss, in that 4 AM of the soul, to understand why we weren’t going to have it with the girls that seemed willing to share. But every now and then the miraculous happened and one of the girls who only wanted to go steady would change her mind. That’s what happened to me.

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