Chinaberry Sidewalks (19 page)

P
ART
F
OUR

From Love’s First Fever to Her Plague

A
round the time of the Kennedy assassination, my parents’ slugfests shifted into high gear. By then I’d reached the age where duty required that I protect my mother, with fists if need be, and throwing my body between my father’s blind rage and her need to wear its markings had become a matter of less consequence than, say, stepping barefoot on a smoldering cigarette. One particularly bloody fracas—starting as an ordinary Saturday morning grocery run and ending up a front-yard melee—left my mother nursing a broken arm and my father with six stitches over his eye. According to her, the break occurred when she, with a sack of groceries in the crook of each arm, got shoved to the ground. When I caught up with the action, he was dragging her down the sidewalk, trailing canned goods and sandwich fixings in their wake, a dozen eggs and a jar of Miracle Whip lying cracked in the driveway.

It was as if I’d sprinted onto the set of some preposterous sitcom. A handsome nutcase with a twelve-pack of Cokes dangling from his free hand is hauling his wife off to God knows where, caveman-style, and she’s cursing their ill-mannered new neighbor, who’s ignoring her tongue-lashing and idly slathering soapsuds across the hood of his Pontiac. I was surprised to hear her aim “pencil-dick idiot” at Clayton Poole but thrilled she could verbally castrate a guy like that, showing some fortitude and presaging a kind of breakthrough.

Realizing that my mother was drawing strength from her predicament, I held off jumping into the fray and was soon glad I had, for in the next instant, she made a move that would ultimately redefine her marriage. Denouncing Mr. Poole as a worthless sack of shit, she managed to scramble to her feet, pull a Coke loose, and coldcock my father with the blunt end of the bottle, and as quick as that their battle was over. As for the war: A scattering of skirmishes were yet to be waged, one minor dustup coming as late as the summer of ’66, but from that day on the fire of their inferno was dwindling out.

I’d never been more proud of my mother than I was at that moment. My father gave the impression that he, too, was pleased, that he knew he’d been bested and chosen to be magnanimous in defeat. Neither one of them knew what protocol followed a haymaker of that caliber, and they more or less milled around next to the street until it was clear their injuries necessitated crawling into the car and speeding off to the hospital.

The calm after this storm, like the one at Magnolia Gardens, was very much to my liking, and I went about gathering up the scattered groceries at a leisurely pace. Eventually, I wandered indoors, pried the cap off a warm Coke, and drained its spewing sweetness in one long gulp.

My mother’s triumphant recount of the emergency-room scene went like this: “Son, I wish you coulda seen your daddy at that hospital. There I was with my arm as crooked as a snake, and him just a-bleedin’. That doctor was tryin’ to figure out what in the name of Pete happened to us, and your daddy’s tellin’ him about how we got in a bad car wreck. The nurse kept on lookin’ at me like she knew that was a big bunch of malarkey, so I went on and told ’em he was lyin’ out his butt. I told the doctor he was tryin’ to strangle me to death, so I busted his head open with a Coke bottle. Your daddy turned whiter than a bed sheet. If he’d a jumped up and finished the job on me right there, it woulda been worth it just to see the look on his face. He didn’t say one word all the way back to the house.”

The turbulence threatening their marriage and my own clubfooted tromp through post-pubescence mirrored the Norvic Street house’s steady decline. When sections of the roof started caving in, my father’s halfhearted attempt to patch the holes with plywood and canvas succeeded only in causing the rotted studs to crumble into damp dust. A month later, the roofing material was strewn across the yard like bombsite debris. Without asking, the Langston kids hauled away the scraps and built a fort in their backyard.

The grace with which I’d once navigated the streets, sidewalks, and alleys of Jacinto City vanished overnight. Where once I’d ridden my bicycle “hands free” and thrown touchdown passes to Dabbo Buck, I was now shaving the sparse hairs on my upper lip and licking the stubble until it looked like a ripe plum. There was also the problem of what to do with a constantly engorged penis.

I can pinpoint the beginning of my downward spiral to the day the seventh-grade algebra teacher reassigned me to the slow learners’ class. Until then, I’d spent a full month sitting across the aisle from Kathy Wallace, a doe-eyed Rapunzel at whose innocent expense I’d been concocting pathetic fairy tales in which she was a beautiful maiden and me her charming prince—that kind of stuff. It had actually been going pretty well. Twice she’d said hello as we passed in the hallway, each time turning my brain to Jell-O. Validation of the dream-girl variety was hard to come by, and I wasn’t prepared to resume the burden of an insignificant existence. But the class demotion put me so far out of step with my peers that a year and a half dragged by before I could regard myself as anything but irrelevant.

On the bus one morning, not long before the math teacher made my learning disabilities public knowledge, Linda Graham assessed my romantic potential point-blank: “You’re kind of cute,” she stated flatly from the seat in back of mine, “but everybody thinks you’re on free lunches.” Historically, this was correct; I
had
been on the free-lunch program in the third and fifth grade, but things were supposedly different now that my father was pulling down three bucks an hour as a carpenter on a building site. But then along comes the rainiest summer in years, and only nine full working days in August kept my mother from paying off the few items of back-to-school clothing she’d put on layaway, so I entered the seventh grade garbed in sixth-grade fashions
and
back on free lunches.

Not until Linda’s casual rebuff did I realize that the pretty girls saw me as a poverty case. Protest was useless, as first impressions of early teens aren’t often changed. Instead of railing against the social structures rendering me unworthy of attention, or informing the teacher that I’d dedicate heart, mind, body, and soul to unlocking the secrets of algebra’s every nuance if it meant keeping my seat in her classroom, I gathered my books and skulked out the door, feeling the warm glow that came from sitting next to Kathy Wallace drain from my body like blood from a knife wound.

At the end of ten months of darkness, Sheila Williams entered my life wearing a bathing suit, with a thumb and forefinger casually realigning its snug fit and tracing the exact curve of the most exquisite rear end ever bestowed on a fourteen-year-old girl. It was, of course, love at first sight.

It the mind-numbing wake of my first ejaculation—self-engendered in the Gulf gas station’s men’s room—an imaginary Sheila appeared lovesick and naked in a series of dream encounters wherein I was the author of her soul’s deepest longings. And in my fantasies, when the eruptions came, they didn’t land onto the splotch-stained page 3 of the
Houston Post
’s sports section I’d kept hidden under the bed ever since discovering love’s addictive throb, but into the velvety triangle made evocatively intimate by her swimwear.

However, my obsession was no secret. One day an ultra-cool ninth-grader stopped me outside the lunchroom. “I know you,” he said. “You’re the guy that goes around singing ‘Sheila’ to yourself all the time.” Tommy Roe’s “Sheila” was a big hit around Houston at the time. “Shit, man, everybody’s in love with her. Get in line.” A few days later, he and another ultra-cool ninth-grader squared off behind the gymnasium, intending to duke it out to prove who stood the best chance of going steady with my “girlfriend.” I was one of maybe ten or twelve students on hand for the showdown.

When the fists flew, for reasons beyond my knowing—perhaps the gut-wrenching hopelessness I shared with these warriors, of being madly in love with the teen goddess of all time—I stepped between them. “All right, let’s break it up!” I shouted in as officious a baritone as my squeaky tenor could muster, just as a vicious right hand sailed past its target and smashed into my left eye. The next thing I knew, a boy from the track team was helping me find the bus. At home, my mother made an ice pack out of a dishrag and advised me to mind my own business, and my father offered to “clean both their daddies’ plows” if I said the word. I thanked him for the gesture and trudged off to my room. For a fortnight I wore the multicolored shiner—blue, black, green, and yellow—that identified me as the fool who broke up the Sheila Williams brawl.

Early in 1964, I retreated into my bedroom with a pawnshop record player and transistor radio, and the music in my sanctuary was, if not the only thing that existed, certainly the only one that mattered. Strumming my Green Stamps tennis racket, I performed “She’s Not There” and “World Without Love” to an audience consisting of
ten thousand
Sheila Williamses.

Six months later, when I sang “Help Me, Rhonda,” it wasn’t along with the Beach Boys but to Rhonda Sisler. Whereas Sheila was sex-soaked and unattainable, Rhonda was willowy, whip-smart, and accessible. Without knowing it, she inspired me to trade my cheap racket for a Merseybeat band of my own, and I began practicing guitar with a purpose. Winning the eighth-grade talent contest and Miss Sisler’s affection became my singular goal. Believing as I did that the only way to get a girl was with a guitar, David Warren started showing up after school with an electric guitar, grinning and grateful for my mother’s who-gives-a-shit attitude about rock and roll. A few months later, boasting a repertoire of the simplest Ray Charles, Animals, Beatles, and Rolling Stones songs, we considered ourselves primed for the local stage. With Jake Harper on drums and Chris Bechtold, David, and I strumming guitars, the Rolling Tones were ready to rock.

The band’s first public appearance, at the Green’s Bayou Teen Canteen, was a meandering affair, and our shouting matches over what key and in what order the six-song set would be presented were far more memorable than the music itself. The moments of cohesion we’d achieved during three rehearsals were absent when the curtain went up. After the concert’s merciful conclusion, Chris, Jake, and David chatted with newly converted fans like seasoned superstars while I chose instead to sulk.

The Rolling Tones broke up three days later, ostensibly due to the piss-poor quality of my pawnshop guitar and amplifier, but most likely it was my attitude. I’d already decided that these losers were holding me back.

I entered the talent contest solo. Plunking away on my father’s beat-up acoustic guitar, I got through “Can’t Buy Me Love” and placed third. Emboldened by my success, I attended the celebration hosted by the winner, a chatty tap dancer whose mother, I soon learned, had herself hoofed it to a first-place finish in a similar contest two decades earlier. The upside: Rhonda Sisler would be there.

Thanks to a delegation of blowhard ninth-graders who were boring her stiff with tales of their basketball exploits, I slipped into the gathering unnoticed. Remaining so was my next objective. Accepting congratulations from Duchess Ledbetter and Cyril Easley on the third-place finish was a good start; like me, they were strictly bottom-tier personalities and unlikely to draw much attention. Staging a phony conversation with a science geek everybody called Ray-Gun was even better; as long as we stayed huddled in a corner, nobody would ever guess I was turning the party into a Rhonda Sisler surveillance maneuver. Incidentally, the consensus among my ex-bandmates was that the high point in the talent contest had been when the science geek—sporting a white lab coat and affecting every cliché in the amateur illusionist’s handbook—demonstrated an “experiment” in which, by rigging an electric-train transformer to an extension cord, he infused a ten-penny nail with great magnetic powers. Halfway through the act, the junior Rebels in the audience let him have it from all sides, which outburst sent Mrs. Gann, the junior high vice principal, scurrying up and down the aisles in a useless attempt to silence their taunting. But no sooner had she squelched one set of hecklers than another delegation broke out in some hard-to-reach section of the auditorium. All this went on longer than it might have if “Old Eagle Beak”—Mrs. Gann’s nickname since time immemorial—hadn’t threatened the entire student body with two weeks in detention, an overreaction that resulted in the science geek’s finishing his routine to a nasty chorus of boos meant instead to lambaste her. After the eighth-grade Mr. Wizard’s effusive final bow, old Mr. Tatum, the dyspeptic janitor, sauntered onstage, broom and dustpan in hand, and swept up the pile of paper clips and safety pins that had fallen to the floor so Miss Win Another For Mother could dance unimpeded into the history books. Just for the record, my disgruntled musician pals had it right: Ray-Gun’s performance was by far the most memorable of the competition and deserved the top prize.

It wasn’t until I enlisted the services of our hostess’s mother that Operation Rhonda ran into trouble. At first, her prattling fit my needs perfectly. By feigning agreement with such pronouncements as “Tap will outlast rock and roll, by golly” and “I’m just sorry the war ended before I was old enough to go over there and dance for the boys,” I was able, via stolen glances, to memorize my new dream girl’s lanky figure. But when her observations about “doilies” and “throw rugs” and “matching end tables” started scrambling the secret fantasies I purportedly was sponging from my beloved’s subconscious mind, I knew we’d lost something as a team and was a breath shy of thanking her for allowing me into her lovely home when “converted garage” smashed through my skull like a drunk driver. And that’s when Rhonda Sisler caught me staring.

I averted my gaze but she refused to accept the cowardice. “I saw you looking at me,” she scolded playfully, crossing the room with an economy of stride that rendered the floor her own private conveyor belt. “I’m Rhonda Sisler,” she said, beaming, insisting with a carefree toss of her head that I admire her honey-colored tresses. Then came a smile that would dazzle even the blind.