Here Comes Trouble (28 page)

The second half of the date went better. First, we didn’t die of food poisoning. We found a nice place in the park and I broke out the bucket of chicken and some warm lemonade, laid a blanket out on the grass and we sat and talked about Vietnam, Mrs. Corning’s art class, and Rod Serling’s
Night Gallery.
She told me how I’d been good for her, and I looked at her and tried to figure out what she meant. Then it was time to go (I had to get the car back). We tossed the scraps in the trash barrel, rolled the blanket back up, and got in the car. I drove her home. We sat in the driveway.

“Thanks for the neat time,” she said.

“You’re welcome. I had a nice time.”

“Was this your first date?” she asked sympathetically.

“Uh, what do you mean? No, I’ve gone out. Lots.”

She smiled and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

“Let’s do this again,” she said.

Again?! You mean, go through all this
again?
I was exhausted.

“Sure,” I said. “That’ll be fun.”

She got out, flashed another one of her sweet smiles, and I never saw her again.

Date #2

Sharon Johnson was the vice president of the student council. We often clashed and voted on opposite sides of the issues. She was very much for everyone getting along and finding “common ground.” By the time I was a senior, I wanted to organize walkouts, boycotts of the lunchroom, and study-hall revolts. She hated hippies but played folk guitar in the choir and led the school in “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” at the spring talent show. She thought student council should plan school dances and hold theme-oriented “fun days.” I thought student council should ask why we had no black teachers. She’d roll her eyes and shake her head at me.

She was perfect dating material.

It had been nearly four months since my one and only date and, being a teenage boy, I was going a bit bonkers. And what better way to push myself right off the cliff than to get fixated on a girl who found me slightly reprehensible?

The local congressman, Don Riegle, a liberal Republican at the time (he later switched parties), had asked to meet with two student reps from each of the county’s high schools at his office in Flint. Sharon and I were picked from Davison High. I offered to drive and told her I would pick her up.

It was early on a Saturday morning when I pulled in her driveway. I honked to let her know I was there (getting out of the car and knocking on the door might make me seem too forward; had to play it cool). There was no response, so I honked a second time. At that moment she appeared at her upstairs bedroom window. She was wearing only a bra.

“Hold your horses!” she shouted down at me. “I heard you the first time!”

Simply wishing she had more lines to yell at me so she could stand there a bit longer in her underwear wasn’t going to make it happen. She abruptly closed the window. My eyes were frozen on that window and I waited anxiously for the encore.

But when I saw her next, she was coming out the front door, this time fully clothed.

“Let’s go,” she ordered. “And quit staring at my chest.”

“Whaddaya mean—you just showed me your chest!”

That
was the best I could do? Act
upset?
Like I was
mad
I got to (sorta) see her breasts? Jesus, I could have thought of something nice to say, I could have offered her a compliment or an indication that she looked nice, I might have even figured out that she came to the window that way because she
liked
me. But that possibility was nowhere to be found in the shallow pool that passed for my total lifelong experience with girls.

We were late for the congressman’s meeting. So what?
I got to see Sharon Johnson in a bra!
I was unable to listen to anything the congressman had to say, as I was trying to remember and store those entire four seconds at her window.
⁷

When the time came to send the high school kids on their way, I went up to Mr. Riegle to ask for a favor.

“Congressman,” I said, “I was wondering if you would come to our high school and speak about the war?”

“If it fits with my schedule, sure. Just check with my staff here and we’ll see if we can set it up.”

I drove Sharon back to her house. She was not happy with my request of the congressman, as he was famous for being only one of two Republicans in Congress who were opposing Nixon’s reelection over the issue of the war. Sharon felt that my invitation to Riegle was sure to upset our high school principal.

“What’s Mr. Scofield going to say when the congressman calls and says he can speak at the school?” she asked, perturbed. “Do you think he’ll be able to tell a congressman no? Of course not!”

“I’m glad you’re with me on this,” I said with a grin. “You wanna go to a movie sometime?”

Wow. I did it. I said it. And all it took was to see a functioning bra in use.

But wait!
Oh, no—here comes the rejection.

“Sure. How ’bout next Saturday night?”

“Sure.”

“See you in student council Monday.”

And on Monday we were right back at it, with her voting with the majority to shoot down my latest proposal to declare “Church Night” unconstitutional (no after-school activities were allowed on Wednesday nights in Davison’s public schools, as that was the night the Protestant churches in town held their midweek church services).

When Saturday came around I picked out the movie to take her to, something I had seen back in the summer and could not get enough of:
Billy Jack.
This movie, I believed, would convert her to my worldview. In the movie, an ex–Green Beret is now a Zenlike Native American who takes on the local town rednecks and conservatives when they try to shut down a hippie “free school.” And there were breasts in the movie!

It was a chilly fall evening as I pulled my dad’s Impala into her driveway. This time I got out and went to the door. Her father answered and greeted me with the justifiable suspicion that was required in those days. As he did a quick scan into my eyes, let’s just say he did not like what he saw. Sharon appeared wearing a sweater that was modest but low-cut enough to confirm her father’s assessment of what the two of us were up to.

“When do you plan to have her home?” he asked.

“As soon as the movie is over, Mr. Johnson,” I said doing my best Eddie Haskell impersonation. “Just two hours, sir.”

“OK, don’t make it past eleven thirty.”

OK. Eleven thirty. Perfect. That should give us a good twenty minutes of making out, whatever that was.

We got in the Chevy and closed the doors. I put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. I turned it again. Still nothing. Dead. I pumped the gas pedal and tried to start it again. Silence. This car was not going anywhere. Fortunately it was dark enough to cover how red my face was.

“Wow. I’m so sorry,” I said. “It does this from time to time. Needs a new battery, I think.”

“So, what are we going to do?” Sharon said, in a coquettish voice.

“I guess we could ask your dad for a jump.”

“Yes, we could do that. I think it’s a bad idea.”

“So, what do you suggest?”

“We could just sit here and talk.”

“Sure,” I said. “But won’t he see us out here?”

“You can’t see anything out here from in there at night. He’ll never look out here ’til it gets near eleven thirty. Plus, he thinks we’ve already left.”

Huh. OK. Seemed like a plan. And so we talked.

We talked about teachers we liked and didn’t, we talked about having siblings, we talked about the football team and the choir and where each of us were thinking of going to college. We even talked about our battles on student council.

All the while I kept wondering when the “sex” thing would start. I had no idea where to begin so I assumed she would just take the lead—I feel you can assume this when the someone in question comes to the window and greets you in a bra—and so I soldiered on through more conversation about
All in the Family,
Peter, Paul & Mary, the new freeway through Flint, Jarts, Jesus, Uptown Bob’s vs. Downtown Bob’s, how I got out of gym class in tenth grade, Jim Morrison’s recent death, Walt Disney World opening next month, her new bell bottoms, the recent Apollo 15 mission, the Concert for Bangladesh, where was Attica, a new fabric store she discovered in the mall, eighteen-year-olds getting the right to vote—everything but sex. Having exhausted all topics for discussion, I threw caution into the backseat.

“So, we never talked about you at the window last week,” I said, as if I was just going on to the next item in the news.

“Oh, you mean these?” she said as she pulled her sweater down a bit to reveal a bit more cleavage.

“Yes, those. Where did you get them?”

This made her laugh, and she slid over on the seat and put her head on my shoulder.

“I just thought you deserved a peek,” she said. “Nothing more.”

“You mean nothing more then, or nothing more now?”

“I mean, you saw what you saw, now let’s enjoy this moment.”

I did my best to enjoy it. Her hair smelled like tropical fruit, but I had no idea what tropical fruit
really was
unless bananas counted. I put my fingers through her hair to move it out of her face. She sat up.

“Oh my, look what we’ve done to the windows!”

What windows?
would have been a good question, because I couldn’t
see
the windows, or at least I couldn’t see
out
of them. Every inch of them was steamed up after two hours of us yapping away and two minutes of me thinking “something” was gonna happen. We could no longer see the house, and certainly no one could see the inside of this car. If this was going to be the moment, then now was the time to act.

“Wow,” she went on, “it looks like we’ve been messing around in here all night!”

“So let’s justify the steam!” I suggested clunkily.

“I think I better get inside before my dad sees us.”

And with that, she opened up the car door.

“C’mon,” she said, “we gotta see if he can get your car started.”

I got out and went with her to the door. We walked in and there were her mom and dad and younger sister, all sitting in the living room.

“How was the movie?” her mother inquired.

“Really good,” Sharon replied convincingly. “Dad, we pulled back in and Mike’s car died in the driveway. Do you think you could look at it?”

Mr. Johnson, like most dads in an auto town, was more than happy to be asked to display his mechanical prowess. “Sure, let’s see what the problem is.”

We walked outside and down the driveway. As we approached the Impala, the windows were still half-steamed! I started to prepare my defense.

“Mike, why don’t you give it a start?” he said, oblivious to the moisture from his daughter’s mouth that had altered the look of my car.

I quickly got in and rolled the windows down in order to help dissipate the translucency of the windshield. I also turned the key in the ignition to the sound of nothing.

“OK, let’s give it a jump and see if that’ll work.”

He went to the garage and drove his car back to mine, got out his jumper cables and connected his battery to the one under my hood.

“Try it again,” he shouted.

I gave the key a turn to the right and instantly the motor came on. Finally, something started tonight.

“That’s it,” he said, looking now through the windshield for the first time, all clear and easy to see through. “Need to get that battery checked out.”

I thanked him and said good-bye to Sharon.

“See you Monday,” I said, trying to cover the sound of the end of my high school dating career.

“See you Monday,” she said.

Twenty Names

“M
OORE, YOUR SHIRTTAIL
is out!”

It was the voice of Mr. Ryan, the assistant principal for discipline at my high school, and he was right on my back. Not figuratively. He was literally
on it.

“Turn around!”

I did as I was told.

“You know the rules. Shirts are to be tucked in.”

I tucked it in.

“Bend over.”

He was carrying “The Paddle,” a shortened version of a cricket bat, but with holes drilled in it to get maximum velocity.

“C’mon, this is not right,” I protested. “It’s a
shirt!
”

“Bend over. Don’t make me tell you again.”

I did as I was told. And as I was bending over, I marked the date on my mental calendar as being the last time I would ever do what I was told to do again.

WHACK!

I felt that intensely. The flat board of hard wood smacking against my rear end, and the two-second delay before the pain set in.

WHACK!

He did it again. Now it really hurt. I could already feel the heat of my skin through my pants, and I wanted to take that paddle and bash him over the head.

WHACK!