FIRST CONVERSION
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
Isaac Watts, Against Idleness and Mischief
Devil’s gonna get you
Devil’s gonna get you
Oh, the devil’s gonna get you
Man just as sure as you’re born.
Porter Grainger
.
When I reached high school, I discovered that I had less and less leisure time to get into much trouble.
Except, of course, for the World’s Largest Pipe Wrench and the fire hydrants in the new housing development.
“The Wrench,” as it came to be called, couldn’t possibly have been nine feet long, or it wouldn’t have fit in the trunk of a car. It only looked that long. And it can’t have weighed as much as I remember, or it would have taken two of us to carry it. As it was, it only took a minimum of two of us to enjoy it.
James or Frankie or Bill would ask Warren or me (after all, “the wrench” was ours) on a Thursday or Friday afternoon, “Are you guys gonna use ‘the wrench’ this weekend? Can we borrow it?”
*
Yet another square-mile section of Midwest City was being developed for tract houses. Probably according to The Master Plan.
Underground utilities always go in first in a new development; then roads are graded; then building pads are graded and stakes with colored flags planted at the corner of each surveyed lot.
But this development was not your small-potatoes operation by a home-boy contractor who scraped together enough money to buy an acre or two and put in ten or twenty houses. This development was almost an entire section, a square mile, the best part of six hundred and forty acres. At least 2,000 homes, allowing for streets, another school site and space along the four section lines for strip malls and other commercial development. All of the twisty streets for which Midwest City was famous were graded before a single concrete pad was poured or a single frame went up.
And within a few hundred feet of each other along those graded dirt roads were scores of fire hydrants, already connected to the municipal water supply.
All of them just waiting to do what fire hydrants were designed to do.
*
I stole the pipe wrench from a construction site and tossed it into Warren’s trunk. It may have taken us a week or two to realize that its entertainment value was worth its own weight, but then good fortune is not always accompanied by knowledge of good fortune.
The new housing development was deserted when the contractors and workmen went home every afternoon, and was a great place to drive with your girlfriend after a movie for what was then known as “parking and petting.” Well… “parking and/or petting,” since you could park without petting but it was difficult to pet without parking. These are quaint concepts today, when fifteen-year-old girls are only too anxious to make their boyfriends’ dreams come true. But in mid-America in mid-century, they were serious concerns for adults.
One church even published a series of pamphlets about the evils of “petting,” coyly never spelling out what the vile deed consisted of, but leaving no doubt that it led to pregnancy and social ostracism, with Ingrid Bergman as a prime example. As if any of us knew anything about the Bergman-Rosselini scandal, which had occurred when we were about three years old.
But boys will be boys, girls will be girls and hormones will out. Sooner or later, nearly all of the girls found themselves with their bras unhooked and wondering just how firmly to fend off the hand now fumbling at the button on their pants.
We still operated on the baseball analogy in those days: kissing was first base, petting above the waist was second base, petting below the waist was third base and “going all the way” was a home run. Useful euphemisms in a more innocent age, they have since gone the way of “23 skidoo” and “cut a rug.” I actually had to explain them to my stepdaughter. God, do I feel old sometimes.
Today, according to Kristi, virginal girls don’t mark their progress in such slow and defined steps. If you’ve been “going with” a guy for a couple of months, and you’re at least fourteen or fifteen, you don’t waste time on second and third bases. You just stroll casually from first base to home plate.
*
I’m not a prude, nor am I a sexual hypocrite. I bought Kristi her first condoms when she was fourteen, and she has repaid me by being sexually responsible, by not being promiscuous and by being open and honest with me.
Today’s kids have much healthier sexual attitudes than we did, but I can’t help feeling that they’re missing a hell of a lot of the fun, without “parking.” Adolescent sex is supposed to be a little furtive, a little dirty, a little like the world’s longest foreplay, with each successive step savored for its delicious naughtiness. The girl goes home to bed with an exaggerated swoon, reliving again and again the feel of her love’s hands on her body. The boy goes home to bed and masturbates.
Once when Marianne and I were reminiscing about our teen years, Kristi could hardly believe we were serious. “You mean you did it in a car?” she asked, aghast.
*
The embryonic subdivision could also be used for killing off the last few beers of the evening when you’ve failed again to score, or for sleeping it off in the car before driving back home the next morning to change clothes and go to work (each of you, of course, having spent the night at the other’s house…).
(Unless, of course, you were me, who came and went as I wanted and who was only moments away from realizing that I needed to get into the child-rearing business and start rearing myself.)
“Sleeping it off” was probably how Warren and I discovered what a city planning commission would have termed the “Highest and Best Use” for the World’s Largest Pipe Wrench. The wrench was still in Warren’s trunk one night when we pulled into a hidden cul-de-sac of the new Meadowood subdivision, not quite too drunk to go home, but intending to remedy that fact right there.
Instead, while polishing off our dessert of cherry brandy, our attention kept coming back to the fire hydrant. And then to the heretofore worthless piece of stolen equipment in Warren’s trunk. And then back to the fire hydrant.
You don’t open the cap on a fire hydrant with just any old tool found in your average garage workshop, or, for that matter, in your average neighborhood hardware store. Firemen have a hydrant wrench. Lacking that, two guys can open a hydrant with a giant pipe wrench.
In all fairness, it did take us a couple of attempts to iron out the bugs. When we first got the large cap unscrewed, we were puzzled because there was no water. One of us eventually noticed that maybe you had to turn the faucet on? You know, that thingee on the top?
Loosening that “thingee on the top” eventually freed a four-inch-diameter gush of water capable of gouging a trench two feet deep and at least twenty feet long across the dirt roadway. It would have been as much fun as the cherry bomb in the Skytrain bathroom years before, except for the fact that we couldn’t hang around to see the reaction.
Of course we were careful. Warren and I were much too smart for the adults in town, and were never caught at anything. We weren’t dummies. We didn’t open hydrants on any regular or predictable basis and we only told about and/or loaned the “The Wrench” to our dozen or so closest personal friends.
And it continued to be great fun for several months, until the night Frankie Kincaid dropped his wallet at the scene.
Policemen (and I’m sure they didn’t include Grady) know how to con teenagers, so Frankie ratted. Luckily, neither Warren nor I had been along that evening, so we escaped any punishment. But we lost the “The Wrench,” and if Frankie were alive today, I would tell him he owes me two hundred bucks for voluntarily surrendering my wrench.
*
And except for the master key to the school. I honestly don’t remember how I scored this treasure, but it opened every lock in the entire building. I used it for purposes both good and bad, including opening the door to home room when the teacher was late, and later passed it on to Rick as a legacy. Rick, unfortunately, was too honest to use it for its intended purpose – mischief. Despite my request that he pass it on to a deserving sophomore or junior upon his graduation, it probably rests today in a junk drawer at Rick’s house or in a landfill somewhere just outside of Midwest City.
My friend, Dwain, and I used it at 2 a.m. one night so he could change his English grades in one classroom while I wrote “FUCK HARMS” in felt-tip pen on the movie screen in Mr. Harms’ chemistry lab.
*
And except for Friday nights, which were still reserved for cruising and drinking beer with Warren and sometimes banging the bimbo across town while her mother was passed out in bed.
And except for being the keeper of the communal alcohol supply because I had a lockable cabinet in my bedroom.
Well, reformation was a slow process for several years, and not visible at all to Mildred, who focused solely on the family dynamics to the exclusion of my grades, my activities and the fact that I hadn’t been arrested in some time.
**
I worked after school to earn money to repay my mother for the loan she had made to me to buy the hupmobile (actually a 1954 Studebaker, but so nicknamed by one of the cooks at the cafeteria where I worked), to pay for gasoline, insurance and repairs, to pay for beer and hamburgers on Friday nights and hamburgers and movies on Saturday nights with a date.
One of my first jobs was at a discount department store called GEX (Government Employees’ Exchange), part of a chain whose gimmick was that you had to be a member, and in order to become a member, you had to be a government employee, or be related to a government employee, or know someone whose house cleaner also cleaned the house of a government employee.
“Government employees are not like the rest of the working force,” Mr. Cico would explain at the interminable employee rallies. “Their salaries aren’t competitive with the marketplace, and it literally takes an Act of Congress for them to get a raise. That’s what we’re about. We were established to give an even break to our civil servants.”
It was bullshit, and the employees knew it. But still. A job was a job.
Like today’s discount warehouses, you had to show your membership card to gain entrance. And employees were required to show their badges.
*
I had taken up smoking at about age seventeen because Warren smoked. Having an addictive personality, it took me forty years to finally quit, while I suspect that Warren probably quit on a whim in his thirties.
I was technically not allowed to smoke in Mildred’s house, although Bob smoked both cigars and pipes. But I did occasionally smoke in my bedroom (what the HELL right did they have to tell ME what to do? I was the one rearing Steve by this point, and my boy was getting good grades, earning his own money at the rate of $1.25 an hour and beginning to plan his future.)
Big set-to one evening about the smoking: Mildred lecturing, Bob walking through the house dramatically spritzing room deodorizer. I grabbed another spray can and played “dueling deodorants.” “Mine is unscented,” I challenged with a smirk, before slamming out the front door to go spend the night at Warren’s house.
Thirty minutes later, I was back, feeling incredibly stupid, not exactly knowing how to deal with the situation, but willing to take my lumps like a proper adult.
“Uh…this is a little bit embarrassing, but, uh…I forgot my employee badge.”
**
Not long before, I had discovered the high school’s speech and drama classes, and learned that my smart mouth could be used to win praise instead of to reinforce my outward image. And I discovered that I was a ham at heart. My occasional outbursts had always tended to be a bit histrionic.
Midwest City High School was appropriately noted first for its football team and second for its basketball squad. But a distant third was the speech team, which always qualified several students for the state speech tournament each year at the University of Oklahoma.
So, what with speech activities, working part-time and girls (who were so much more fun after you got wheels of your own), I found myself with very little time left over for mischief. If I changed course, it really was at first a matter of time management and only later a conscious choice.
I don’t at all think of speech class as a Monument to My Reformation, but rather as a footprint. Faulkner wrote that a monument only says, “at least I got this far.” A footprint says “here is where I rested for a while before I started off again.”
*
Loving to read was my salvation, and Damon Runyon was the fuse that sparked my reformation.
Runyon was a New York sports writer in the 1920s and ‘30s who became famous for his comic short stories about Broadway night life and lowlifes. The musical “Guys and Dolls” was made from bits and pieces of his stories. I discovered an old copy of a Runyon anthology in Mrs. Dishman’s library and fell in love.
One sophomore day, a junior student came into English class to present his “humorous interpretation” event, an abridgement of Runyon’s “Rusty Minds the Baby.”
I would love to do that, I thought, and the next week switched one of my elective classes for Speech. I wasn’t really very good at it, but I did try my hand at humorous interpretation, dramatic interpretation, writing speeches (Original Oratory), delivering other people’s speeches (Interpretive Oratory), debate and acting. During the next three years I became a card-carrying member of both the National Forensic League and the National Thespian Society. (Not that I could resist the humor of it. I felt like the young George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” telling pre-teen Mary that “I’ve been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society!”)
Contrary as always, when the class produced the musical, “Li’l Abner,” I asked for the part of Evil-Eye Fleegle.
*
Debate taught me to think. The subject my first year was “Reciprocal free trade with non-Communist nations,” a big item on the Kennedy agenda. Each year’s subject was chosen by some national organization or other, and was the same for high schools across the country. The second year, we debated the pros and cons of extending the Social Security system to include medical care for the elderly, a concept which later became Medicare.
This was a whole new world. This was no longer getting in trouble at school for the sin of being bored or at home for the sin of…what? Being a child? Not being an adult? For being in the way or inconvenient or for not being warm and cuddly enough? I didn’t have to hit Sharon any more to get attention? I didn’t have to live down to expectations?
It was maybe just the slightest bit more interesting than “I know this old boy with a blah-de-blah engine and a hoo-de-doo carb and he’d let me have it for about a buck ninety-five,” or “there was this big-ol’ buck about a hunnerd yards away, and I drawed down on him with the thirty-ought-six and dropped him with one shot.” Or Mildred’s philosophical musings about whether Mitch Miller or Lawrence Welk was the better musician.
This was almost like accomplishing something. It channeled my skepticism into an attempt to convince, rather than my usual half-conscious attempt to alienate, feeling that I had lost before I ever spoke.
I had a chance to win, for a change. Not that I did win all that often, my cockiness frequently leading to sloppy research and my sloppy research to getting my butt kicked.
But I didn’t need to learn that if I got my butt kicked it was my own fault. I had always known that. But at least now I was evenly matched.
Most importantly, it gave me a fresh mask to wear.
Sometimes almost tongue-tied in one-on-one conversation (it would be years yet before I could look another person directly in the eyes), I could give a presentation to a group and talk, perform, “act” natural. Just so long as I had a role to play.
Suddenly, for debate research, I was reading Time and Newsweek and studying charts in the Statistical Abstract of the United States. I discovered not only that I should, but that I really wanted to go to college. I discovered that I liked having good grades, but even more than that, I wanted an education.
Damn. Better not let the folks find out about this.
But I needn’t have worried. They weren’t interested, assuming that my new fixation was probably as unsavory as all of my other activities and letting me know, when I lost an after-school job for taking too much time off for speech activities, that maybe I should re-evaluate my priorities. How was I going to get ahead in life, how was I going to go to college, if I couldn’t even keep a job?
*
When I was a junior, Mildred asked me to ask my senior friends if it were possible to go to college for $100 a semester, which was all she felt she could afford, what with making double monthly house payments, saving heftily for retirement, and all. My friends laughed at me.
Tuition at the University of Oklahoma was an incredibly low $7.00 per semester-hour. A full-time student (i.e., a male wanting to postpone being drafted) carried at least twelve hours per semester. Serious students took sixteen to eighteen hours per semester, meaning tuition alone was around a hundred bucks, give or take. The cheapest dormitories were $90.00 a month, and then there were the books.
Mildred had been working on me to apply to the Air Force Academy. After all, I had always wanted to fly. And the tuition would be free. I did apply, and didn’t make it. So she decided I should become a barber.
“Barber school is only nine months, and then you would have a trade and could put yourself through college,” she suggested. “You know, your grandfather was a barber, and your Uncle Lawrence is a barber.”
“But Mil, I don’t want to be a barber. Don’t you understand that the ambition of half of the girls in my class is to go to cosmetology school so they can spend the rest of their lives doing beehive hairdos? I want an education.”
Wrong argument. From the time of her divorce in her 40’s to her abandonment of most personal hygiene in her 80’s, Mil had only washed her hair once a week. She went to the hairdresser every Saturday for a shampoo, a cut, a style and half a can of industrial-strength hairspray, and slept on a silk pillowcase to prevent her hair from being mussed in between beauty parlor appointments. And besides, was I implying there was something wrong with beehive hairdos?
“You want a journalism degree,” she snorted. “How do you expect to make a living?”
“I’ll make a living. And besides,” I added, foolishly thinking that I could trump her, “if I don’t go to college straight out of high school, I’ll be drafted.”
“Well maybe the Army would pay for your college then.” Queen of trumps.
“I am not going to barber school. That’s it! End of discussion! You have the money!” King of trumps.
“Well,” she finished icily. “You know what my monthly obligations are. You know I can’t spend Bob’s money for your education. I just don’t know how you’re going to do it.”
Ace of trumps.
Next Up: The Man Who Owned Oklahoma City
CHAPTER 19
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
Isaac Watts, Against Idleness and Mischief
Devil’s gonna get you
Devil’s gonna get you
Oh, the devil’s gonna get you
Man just as sure as you’re born.
Porter Grainger
When I reached high school, I discovered that I had less and less leisure time to get into much trouble.
Except, of course, for the World’s Largest Pipe Wrench and the fire hydrants in the new housing development.
“The Wrench,” as it came to be called, couldn’t possibly have been nine feet long, or it wouldn’t have fit in the trunk of a car. It only looked that long. And it can’t have weighed as much as I remember, or it would have taken two of us to carry it. As it was, it only took a minimum of two of us to enjoy it.
James or Frankie or Bill would ask Warren or me (after all, “the wrench” was ours) on a Thursday or Friday afternoon, “Are you guys gonna use ‘the wrench’ this weekend? Can we borrow it?”
*
Yet another square-mile section of Midwest City was being developed for tract houses. Probably according to The Master Plan.
Underground utilities always go in first in a new development; then roads are graded; then building pads are graded and stakes with colored flags planted at the corner of each surveyed lot.
But this development was not your small-potatoes operation by a home-boy contractor who scraped together enough money to buy an acre or two and put in ten or twenty houses. This development was almost an entire section, a square mile, the best part of six hundred and forty acres. At least 2,000 homes, allowing for streets, another school site and space along the four section lines for strip malls and other commercial development. All of the twisty streets for which Midwest City was famous were graded before a single concrete pad was poured or a single frame went up.
And within a few hundred feet of each other along those graded dirt roads were scores of fire hydrants, already connected to the municipal water supply.
All of them just waiting to do what fire hydrants were designed to do.
*
I stole the pipe wrench from a construction site and tossed it into Warren’s trunk. It may have taken us a week or two to realize that its entertainment value was worth its own weight, but then good fortune is not always accompanied by knowledge of good fortune.
The new housing development was deserted when the contractors and workmen went home every afternoon, and was a great place to drive with your girlfriend after a movie for what was then known as “parking and petting.” Well… “parking and/or petting,” since you could park without petting but it was difficult to pet without parking. These are quaint concepts today, when fifteen-year-old girls are only too anxious to make their boyfriends’ dreams come true. But in mid-America in mid-century, they were serious concerns for adults.
One church even published a series of pamphlets about the evils of “petting,” coyly never spelling out what the vile deed consisted of, but leaving no doubt that it led to pregnancy and social ostracism, with Ingrid Bergman as a prime example. As if any of us knew anything about the Bergman-Rosselini scandal, which had occurred when we were about three years old.
But boys will be boys, girls will be girls and hormones will out. Sooner or later, nearly all of the girls found themselves with their bras unhooked and wondering just how firmly to fend off the hand now fumbling at the button on their pants.
We still operated on the baseball analogy in those days: kissing was first base, petting above the waist was second base, petting below the waist was third base and “going all the way” was a home run. Useful euphemisms in a more innocent age, they have since gone the way of “23 skidoo” and “cut a rug.” I actually had to explain them to my stepdaughter. God, do I feel old sometimes.
Today, according to Kristi, virginal girls don’t mark their progress in such slow and defined steps. If you’ve been “going with” a guy for a couple of months, and you’re at least fourteen or fifteen, you don’t waste time on second and third bases. You just stroll casually from first base to home plate.
*
I’m not a prude, nor am I a sexual hypocrite. I bought Kristi her first condoms when she was fourteen, and she has repaid me by being sexually responsible, by not being promiscuous and by being open and honest with me.
Today’s kids have much healthier sexual attitudes than we did, but I can’t help feeling that they’re missing a hell of a lot of the fun, without “parking.” Adolescent sex is supposed to be a little furtive, a little dirty, a little like the world’s longest foreplay, with each successive step savored for its delicious naughtiness. The girl goes home to bed with an exaggerated swoon, reliving again and again the feel of her love’s hands on her body. The boy goes home to bed and masturbates.
Once when Marianne and I were reminiscing about our teen years, Kristi could hardly believe we were serious. “You mean you did it in a car?” she asked, aghast.
*
The embryonic subdivision could also be used for killing off the last few beers of the evening when you’ve failed again to score, or for sleeping it off in the car before driving back home the next morning to change clothes and go to work (each of you, of course, having spent the night at the other’s house…).
(Unless, of course, you were me, who came and went as I wanted and who was only moments away from realizing that I needed to get into the child-rearing business and start rearing myself.)
“Sleeping it off” was probably how Warren and I discovered what a city planning commission would have termed the “Highest and Best Use” for the World’s Largest Pipe Wrench. The wrench was still in Warren’s trunk one night when we pulled into a hidden cul-de-sac of the new Meadowood subdivision, not quite too drunk to go home, but intending to remedy that fact right there.
Instead, while polishing off our dessert of cherry brandy, our attention kept coming back to the fire hydrant. And then to the heretofore worthless piece of stolen equipment in Warren’s trunk. And then back to the fire hydrant.
You don’t open the cap on a fire hydrant with just any old tool found in your average garage workshop, or, for that matter, in your average neighborhood hardware store. Firemen have a hydrant wrench. Lacking that, two guys can open a hydrant with a giant pipe wrench.
In all fairness, it did take us a couple of attempts to iron out the bugs. When we first got the large cap unscrewed, we were puzzled because there was no water. One of us eventually noticed that maybe you had to turn the faucet on? You know, that thingee on the top?
Loosening that “thingee on the top” eventually freed a four-inch-diameter gush of water capable of gouging a trench two feet deep and at least twenty feet long across the dirt roadway. It would have been as much fun as the cherry bomb in the Skytrain bathroom years before, except for the fact that we couldn’t hang around to see the reaction.
Of course we were careful. Warren and I were much too smart for the adults in town, and were never caught at anything. We weren’t dummies. We didn’t open hydrants on any regular or predictable basis and we only told about and/or loaned the “The Wrench” to our dozen or so closest personal friends.
And it continued to be great fun for several months, until the night Frankie Kincaid dropped his wallet at the scene.
Policemen (and I’m sure they didn’t include Grady) know how to con teenagers, so Frankie ratted. Luckily, neither Warren nor I had been along that evening, so we escaped any punishment. But we lost the “The Wrench,” and if Frankie were alive today, I would tell him he owes me two hundred bucks for voluntarily surrendering my wrench.
*
And except for the master key to the school. I honestly don’t remember how I scored this treasure, but it opened every lock in the entire building. I used it for purposes both good and bad, including opening the door to home room when the teacher was late, and later passed it on to Rick as a legacy. Rick, unfortunately, was too honest to use it for its intended purpose – mischief. Despite my request that he pass it on to a deserving sophomore or junior upon his graduation, it probably rests today in a junk drawer at Rick’s house or in a landfill somewhere just outside of Midwest City.
My friend, Dwain, and I used it at 2 a.m. one night so he could change his English grades in one classroom while I wrote “FUCK HARMS” in felt-tip pen on the movie screen in Mr. Harms’ chemistry lab.
*
And except for Friday nights, which were still reserved for cruising and drinking beer with Warren and sometimes banging the bimbo across town while her mother was passed out in bed.
And except for being the keeper of the communal alcohol supply because I had a lockable cabinet in my bedroom.
Well, reformation was a slow process for several years, and not visible at all to Mildred, who focused solely on the family dynamics to the exclusion of my grades, my activities and the fact that I hadn’t been arrested in some time.
**
I worked after school to earn money to repay my mother for the loan she had made to me to buy the hupmobile (actually a 1954 Studebaker, but so nicknamed by one of the cooks at the cafeteria where I worked), to pay for gasoline, insurance and repairs, to pay for beer and hamburgers on Friday nights and hamburgers and movies on Saturday nights with a date.
One of my first jobs was at a discount department store called GEX (Government Employees’ Exchange), part of a chain whose gimmick was that you had to be a member, and in order to become a member, you had to be a government employee, or be related to a government employee, or know someone whose house cleaner also cleaned the house of a government employee.
“Government employees are not like the rest of the working force,” Mr. Cico would explain at the interminable employee rallies. “Their salaries aren’t competitive with the marketplace, and it literally takes an Act of Congress for them to get a raise. That’s what we’re about. We were established to give an even break to our civil servants.”
It was bullshit, and the employees knew it. But still. A job was a job.
Like today’s discount warehouses, you had to show your membership card to gain entrance. And employees were required to show their badges.
*
I had taken up smoking at about age seventeen because Warren smoked. Having an addictive personality, it took me forty years to finally quit, while I suspect that Warren probably quit on a whim in his thirties.
I was technically not allowed to smoke in Mildred’s house, although Bob smoked both cigars and pipes. But I did occasionally smoke in my bedroom (what the HELL right did they have to tell ME what to do? I was the one rearing Steve by this point, and my boy was getting good grades, earning his own money at the rate of $1.25 an hour and beginning to plan his future.)
Big set-to one evening about the smoking: Mildred lecturing, Bob walking through the house dramatically spritzing room deodorizer. I grabbed another spray can and played “dueling deodorants.” “Mine is unscented,” I challenged with a smirk, before slamming out the front door to go spend the night at Warren’s house.
Thirty minutes later, I was back, feeling incredibly stupid, not exactly knowing how to deal with the situation, but willing to take my lumps like a proper adult.
“Uh…this is a little bit embarrassing, but, uh…I forgot my employee badge.”
**
Not long before, I had discovered the high school’s speech and drama classes, and learned that my smart mouth could be used to win praise instead of to reinforce my outward image. And I discovered that I was a ham at heart. My occasional outbursts had always tended to be a bit histrionic.
Midwest City High School was appropriately noted first for its football team and second for its basketball squad. But a distant third was the speech team, which always qualified several students for the state speech tournament each year at the University of Oklahoma.
So, what with speech activities, working part-time and girls (who were so much more fun after you got wheels of your own), I found myself with very little time left over for mischief. If I changed course, it really was at first a matter of time management and only later a conscious choice.
I don’t at all think of speech class as a Monument to My Reformation, but rather as a footprint. Faulkner wrote that a monument only says, “at least I got this far.” A footprint says “here is where I rested for a while before I started off again.”
*
Loving to read was my salvation, and Damon Runyon was the fuse that sparked my reformation.
Runyon was a New York sports writer in the 1920s and ‘30s who became famous for his comic short stories about Broadway night life and lowlifes. The musical “Guys and Dolls” was made from bits and pieces of his stories. I discovered an old copy of a Runyon anthology in Mrs. Dishman’s library and fell in love.
One sophomore day, a junior student came into English class to present his “humorous interpretation” event, an abridgement of Runyon’s “Rusty Minds the Baby.”
I would love to do that, I thought, and the next week switched one of my elective classes for Speech. I wasn’t really very good at it, but I did try my hand at humorous interpretation, dramatic interpretation, writing speeches (Original Oratory), delivering other people’s speeches (Interpretive Oratory), debate and acting. During the next three years I became a card-carrying member of both the National Forensic League and the National Thespian Society. (Not that I could resist the humor of it. I felt like the young George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” telling pre-teen Mary that “I’ve been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society!”)
Contrary as always, when the class produced the musical, “Li’l Abner,” I asked for the part of Evil-Eye Fleegle.
*
Debate taught me to think. The subject my first year was “Reciprocal free trade with non-Communist nations,” a big item on the Kennedy agenda. Each year’s subject was chosen by some national organization or other, and was the same for high schools across the country. The second year, we debated the pros and cons of extending the Social Security system to include medical care for the elderly, a concept which later became Medicare.
This was a whole new world. This was no longer getting in trouble at school for the sin of being bored or at home for the sin of…what? Being a child? Not being an adult? For being in the way or inconvenient or for not being warm and cuddly enough? I didn’t have to hit Sharon any more to get attention? I didn’t have to live down to expectations?
It was maybe just the slightest bit more interesting than “I know this old boy with a blah-de-blah engine and a hoo-de-doo carb and he’d let me have it for about a buck ninety-five,” or “there was this big-ol’ buck about a hunnerd yards away, and I drawed down on him with the thirty-ought-six and dropped him with one shot.” Or Mildred’s philosophical musings about whether Mitch Miller or Lawrence Welk was the better musician.
This was almost like accomplishing something. It channeled my skepticism into an attempt to convince, rather than my usual half-conscious attempt to alienate, feeling that I had lost before I ever spoke.
I had a chance to win, for a change. Not that I did win all that often, my cockiness frequently leading to sloppy research and my sloppy research to getting my butt kicked.
But I didn’t need to learn that if I got my butt kicked it was my own fault. I had always known that. But at least now I was evenly matched.
Most importantly, it gave me a fresh mask to wear.
Sometimes almost tongue-tied in one-on-one conversation (it would be years yet before I could look another person directly in the eyes), I could give a presentation to a group and talk, perform, “act” natural. Just so long as I had a role to play.
Suddenly, for debate research, I was reading Time and Newsweek and studying charts in the Statistical Abstract of the United States. I discovered not only that I should, but that I really wanted to go to college. I discovered that I liked having good grades, but even more than that, I wanted an education.
Damn. Better not let the folks find out about this.
But I needn’t have worried. They weren’t interested, assuming that my new fixation was probably as unsavory as all of my other activities and letting me know, when I lost an after-school job for taking too much time off for speech activities, that maybe I should re-evaluate my priorities. How was I going to get ahead in life, how was I going to go to college, if I couldn’t even keep a job?
*
When I was a junior, Mildred asked me to ask my senior friends if it were possible to go to college for $100 a semester, which was all she felt she could afford, what with making double monthly house payments, saving heftily for retirement, and all. My friends laughed at me.
Tuition at the University of Oklahoma was an incredibly low $7.00 per semester-hour. A full-time student (i.e., a male wanting to postpone being drafted) carried at least twelve hours per semester. Serious students took sixteen to eighteen hours per semester, meaning tuition alone was around a hundred bucks, give or take. The cheapest dormitories were $90.00 a month, and then there were the books.
Mildred had been working on me to apply to the Air Force Academy. After all, I had always wanted to fly. And the tuition would be free. I did apply, and didn’t make it. So she decided I should become a barber.
“Barber school is only nine months, and then you would have a trade and could put yourself through college,” she suggested. “You know, your grandfather was a barber, and your Uncle Lawrence is a barber.”
“But Mil, I don’t want to be a barber. Don’t you understand that the ambition of half of the girls in my class is to go to cosmetology school so they can spend the rest of their lives doing beehive hairdos? I want an education.”
Wrong argument. From the time of her divorce in her 40’s to her abandonment of most personal hygiene in her 80’s, Mil had only washed her hair once a week. She went to the hairdresser every Saturday for a shampoo, a cut, a style and half a can of industrial-strength hairspray, and slept on a silk pillowcase to prevent her hair from being mussed in between beauty parlor appointments. And besides, was I implying there was something wrong with beehive hairdos?
“You want a journalism degree,” she snorted. “How do you expect to make a living?”
“I’ll make a living. And besides,” I added, foolishly thinking that I could trump her, “if I don’t go to college straight out of high school, I’ll be drafted.”
“Well maybe the Army would pay for your college then.” Queen of trumps.
“I am not going to barber school. That’s it! End of discussion! You have the money!” King of trumps.
“Well,” she finished icily. “You know what my monthly obligations are. You know I can’t spend Bob’s money for your education. I just don’t know how you’re going to do it.”
Ace of trumps.