by Mark Dunn
We will have a new R.J. and Lisha when we set out in June—two new terminally ill orphans whom fate has dealt terrible blows.
We keep photo albums of all of our trips, of all the children we have parented, and loved, and lost. The albums keep me going until the arrival of blessed summer.
1970
SKIRTING THE ISSUE IN WEST VIRGINIA
Starkman’s a good listener. Hell, I tell him things I don’t even tell myself in the bathroom mirror. He has that father-confessor quality about him that opens me up just like a zippered garment bag. Sorry. I’ve got clothes transport on the brain. I work on the fashion floor at the Diamond. I’m a buyer in Misses Dresses, Daytime Dresses, and Furs. But on any given day you’ll find me all over that floor. And this week, with our big Samsonite sale, I’m like the gorilla in that TV ad, pounding all that hard-shell luggage and all but jumping up and down on it. I swear to the ever-lovin’ God of Retail that there are people who are actually buying those suitcases because of my antics, coupled with that saturation ad campaign on TV. And here’s the kicker, if you don’t know it already: those commercials aren’t even for Samsonite! They’re for “Strong Enough to Stand On” American Tourister! You’ve heard of collateral damage, right? This, brother, is what I call a collateral assist!
Speaking of monkeys, or rather monkey suits, Starkman works in the men’s store on street level. He’s been in men’s furnishings since he came here in the early fifties. He was a different sort of man back then. He kept things to himself. Now he tells me everything, and I’m not even—what’s the word the homosexuals are using now?—“gay.” I’m not gay, but I listen to the details of all of his little adventures—the quickies in the men’s washroom and the changing rooms and all his assignations with those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed hill-Billys and hill-Bobbys who come to the big city looking for Mr. Right. Why do I do this? I told you already: because he listens to me. (Let alone the fact that you’d have an easier time finding a John Bircher on college campuses these days than a heterosexual male in the retail clothing line. I’m one for Ripley’s.)
Starkman and I have lunch together two, three times a week—sometimes at Blossom Dairy over on Quarrier, sometimes in the Diamond’s cafeteria up on the fifth floor. Some days we even get a cheese ball and a box of crackers from the Hickory Farms Daisy Mays down in the basement and go alfresco.
We like the cafeteria, though. One of the assistant managers is a past boyfriend of Starkman’s (whom Starkman likes to keep close tabs on). And, on my side, there’s a cashier there that I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now. I think she’s ready to move beyond the flirting stage, and I’m giving the prospect some consideration, but there’s the whole matter of Jillian. What to do about Jillian.
Jillian also works on the fashion floor. She’s in Bridal and Maternity, which I always thought was funny and Starkman thought was a royal hoot. “I hope she spends the first half of her day in Bridal and the second in Maternity. The other way around would be downright illegitimate, don’t you think?”
He’s a funny old fruit, and I love him.
Jillian is twenty-two. She’s married to, but presently separated from, a mountain galoot, who she says has the looks and muscular build of Willy Armitage on Mission Impossible, but the intellectual capacity of Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes.
Jillian has said she likes my looks. She says I remind her of Darrin Stephens on Bewitched. Not the one who’s on now—the first Dick. But I wonder about this, because when we’re going at it like rabbits in the mannequin storage room on the sixth floor, she’s hardly ever looking at me. Apparently her Hoot ’n’ Holler backwoods husband never takes her from behind and that’s what she likes. That’s what she craves.
“Here’s what I need, Starkman,” I said to my friend in the cafeteria yesterday. “I need management to come to their senses about this whole midi thing.”
Starkman set down his coffee cup so he could gesticulate with more freedom. “Isn’t it awful? It’s like those Seventh Avenue Hebrews in New York have lost their ever-lovin’ minds! I’ve never seen anything so hideous in all my life. Now I was never a big fan of the micro-mini like you, Tommy—”
“You bet I was. The thought of getting my daily peeks of panty put a smile on my mug each and every workday morning.”
“You don’t have to be delicate on my account, love. Peeks of panty? Peeks of pussy is more like it. You’re thirty years old and you’ve still got the sex drive of a horny college freshman. Why else do you steal away with Jillian two, three, four times a week to make-the-beast-with-two-backs right there in front of poor Marsha and all her friends?”
“Marsha. You’re talking about that what—that Twilight Zone episode where Anne Francis finds out she’s a mannequin?”
“Beauty mark and all.”
“How do you—” I lowered my voice and leaned in. We were off by ourselves at a secluded table in the cafeteria, but I was taking no chances. “How do you know where Jillian and I tryst?”
“Oh, honey, just call it by its real name. You fornicate. Don’t you just love that word? It’s so Biblical. I absolutely adore the Bible—Leviticus, especially. It’s like reading pornography.”
“There’s a problem here, Starkman, that you probably aren’t aware of.”
“And that is…?”
“The midi. The midi! Granted, it’s a stupid concept—taking hems down below the knee. Only a few women can pull it off. Doris Day. Doris Day can pull it off, because she looks good in boots. The leg is gone. I happen to be a leg man, Starkman. I miss calves. Shapely thighs? Gone with the wind, baby. Midis aren’t groovy. They’re the anti-groovy.”
“Is there supposed to be a Jillian connection here?”
I nodded. “A big one. Management has issued its decree. You haven’t seen the memo? Well, of course you haven’t. You work in the men’s store. You’re a world unto yourself down there—like the Foreign Legion or something.”
Starkman squirmed. “Oh, the French Foreign Legion. Yum. Cute Frenchmen in white kepis!”
“Listen to me. I’m attempting serious discourse here.”
“What’s the decree, Tommy?”
“The same as what’s being dictated in every other department store around the country: salesgirls have to wear the midi. It’s become a condition for employment. The Diamond, just like every other department store in America, bought too damn many. And women aren’t having them. We pulled our entire inventory of minis, and as a result, our customers are either buying pants and pantsuits in protest or just staying the hell home. The customers aren’t cooperating, Starkman. Doris Day or no Doris Day. Do you blame them? Put a midi skirt on most women and what’s your pleasure: Mennonite housewife or female spy in a bad Russian movie?”
“I’m still waiting for the part where you and Jillian and your frequent appointments with carnality come in.”
“I get turned off. I see her walking into that room looking like Natasha Fatale, and suddenly I lose my—lose my—”
“Do you lose your erection, honey? You can say it. You lose your erection. Let’s say it together.”
I sighed. I try not to lose my patience with Starkman when he gets flip. Because he always gets flip. He thinks he’s one of those bitchy characters in The Boys in the Band.
“All right. I can’t get it up when she wears one of those godawful skirts.”
“But doesn’t she take it all off once the two of you get down to business?”
“Yeah, but it’s still there. She drapes it over the chair and it mocks me. It’s like one of those body-smothering pelts I sell in the fur department. People are going to look back on this period and wonder how we ever survived. The Kremlin should just drop the bomb already and put us out of our misery.”
“She must know that you don’t care a fig for what’s she’s been made to wear, may our beloved management rot in fashion hell.”
“Maybe she knows how I feel, maybe she doesn’t. I just get the strong sense that it isn�
�t an issue for her. In fact, I think she might even like the look. A few women do. She does, after all, have slightly larger thighs than most girls her age, and midis are pretty good at masking that. I don’t know; I’ve tried to analyze it. When I think about it too much it becomes self-defeating in its own way.”
“You mean you get flaccid at the mere thought?”
“Starkman, to be honest, I spend the whole day deflated. I used to love my job. I used to love to watch the women who come to our store—one of the fringe benefits of working in women’s clothing. You probably don’t notice such things, but we’ve got some gorgeous women here in Charleston. But the fashion poobahs have issued their edict, and Women’s Wear Daily has endorsed it, and all women who want their couture sprinkled with a little hip haute must take heed. I’m thinking of changing professions, my friend. But in the short term, I’m thinking of cutting it off with Jillian. It wasn’t going anywhere anyway. And as of late, she’s making noises like she might want to get back together with her husband.”
“So what’s the rub, sir?”
“I don’t know. I just—Starkman, I think there’s some kind of lesson I need to be taking from all of this.”
“What? The fact that you can’t get it up with Jillian anymore, or the general shape of things when it comes to you and your otherwise galloping libido?”
“I don’t want to be that person anymore. That, that, you know—”
“Lothario? Skirt-chaser? Roué?”
“I’m tired of following the edicts of my, you know, dick.”
Starkman cocked his head and pulled his glasses down to regard me from over the frames. “My dear Mr. Benson, I do believe that you have finally grown to strapping, responsible manhood. This whole midi thing has been a wakeup call. You have reached the point of questioning why your pleasure center must be driven exclusively by the animal brain. I, of course, adore the animal brain and how it warms my cockulls—with or without the kulls—but man was given an outer brain too, which is supposed to emancipate him from his baser instincts. My friend Shermy and I, for example, we make passionate man-love, and then we play chess. Do you play chess? You should find a beautiful woman who does—someone who is independently minded, deliberately out of lockstep with the mandated de rigueur.”
“And might not be so ready to toss out all of her micro-minis?”
“Precisely.”
“Have you decided yet if you’re going to get that slice of pie?”
“I have, Tommy. Just now, as we were giving your vacuous swinger’s life a sense of purpose once more, I decided in the affirmative.”
As we were returning to the cafeteria line for our just desserts, I thanked my friend Starkman for his open ear, and for his wise counsel. And he told me in sotto-voce confidentiality that he wished I had been born homosexual. That would have settled matters quite tidily.
Starkman apparently has a thing for guys who look like the husband of Samantha Stephens.
1971
BIBLIOPHILIC IN ALABAMA
Eileen stood in the doorway with her wicker beach basket in one hand and her beach towel in the other. Her chartreuse-colored, wide-brimmed beach hat, circa 1965, revealed only her nose and mouth, and it was a mouth that was turned down and petulant. “It’s an absolutely beautiful morning and you’re all sitting around here like the Dracula family waiting for the sun to go down.”
“Give me just a minute,” implored Julia, not taking her eyes from her book. “I want to get to the end of this chapter.” Julia was reading the popular horror-thriller, The Other, by actor-turned-author Thomas Tryon. Julia kept flipping to the back of the book to look at the jacket photo. He was the best-looking author she’d ever seen.
“Donna? Michael Junior?” Eileen pointed at the beach just outside the motel window. “Are you going to make your poor grandmother sit there by herself like some lonely old lady beach bum? Michael Senior, am I speaking to a wall?”
“A what?”
“A wall, Michael.”
“Of course not.” Eileen’s forty-three-year-old son was lying on the couch with his feet propped up on one of the two armrests. He was reading The New Centurions by policeman-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh.
“You’re as bad as the kids,” said Eileen. “You can’t read your book on the beach? Come keep your mother company.”
“Sure thing, Mom,” said Michael Senior, slapping the book shut and kipping up from the couch. In his most authoritative father-voice he said, “Everybody out to the beach. We came to Gulf Shores for the sun and the surf. Your grandmother’s right. We need to feel the grit of sand between our toes and the taste of salt water on our tongues.”
“Ugh!” pronounced sixteen-year-old Julia, as her fourteen-year-old sister Donna rolled her eyes with commensurate disgust. Donna had been reading The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, who used to work for the U.S. Air Force’s Psychological Warfare Division after selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners and serving as ticket agent for United Airlines. Earlier in the morning Donna had, in the course of reading the horror novel, gasped—audibly—three times, but the sound had registered with no one but her grandmother, who had been sitting at the little table near the motel room’s corner kitchenette, reading absolutely nothing, although she had previously skimmed an article on the front page of the Mobile paper, the Press-Register, about the death of Louis Armstrong. “Satchmo is gone,” she had said softly and plaintively to herself, while recalling her honeymoon trip to New Orleans and all the Dixieland jazz she and her new husband had heard in the Quarter. “Lord, how I want to be in that number,” she mused aloud, absently conjuring up a line from “When the Saints Go Marching In”—a song that always reminded her of the now-silenced singer and trumpeter.
Eileen looked at her two granddaughters and at her twelve-year-old grandson, Michael Junior, who was reading The Lord of the Rings—specifically, the volume entitled The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R.R. Tolkien, who had been, early in his life, employed by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary researching words that started with W.
“Up, up, book vermin,” said Michael Senior, heading off to the bedroom to change into his swimming trunks from his pajamas. “Your illiterate grandmother is feeling neglected.”
Eileen allowed her beaked upper lip to disappear altogether beneath the angry bulldog protrusion of its lower companion. “I really wish you wouldn’t talk about me that way in front of the children,” she called after her son. “I know it’s all in fun. But it’s disrespectful.”
Donna jumped up and shrieked. The shriek had nothing to do with what Eileen had just said.
“This is so gross!” she pronounced, tossing The Exorcist onto the armchair where she had been sitting, scrunched into a little ball of intense engrossment.
“Don’t you dare say a word!” cried her older sister Julia. “You’ll spoil it.”
“You already know what it’s about,” called Michael Junior from the other end of the room.
“But I don’t know if the priest will succeed in getting the devil out of the girl or not. We live in a literary era in which there is no longer the guarantee of a happy ending.”
“It’d be really cool if he couldn’t do it and then ol’ Beelzebub goes and possesses the soul of everybody in Washington—even President Nixon!” said Michael Junior, who had gotten very sunburned the day before reading on the hood of his family’s station wagon and was now covered with globules of white healing salve.
“Put down the books, kids. We’re all going to the beach,” said Michael Senior, “and we’re going to build sandcastles and play in the waves and pretend to be a totally ambulatory, nearly normal American family. We’re all being very rude to your grandmother. She came all the way down here to spend time with us and look how we’re treating her.”
“I’m sorry we’re being so rude, Grandma,” said Julia, who got up from her fold-out cot to put her arms around her grandmother’s waist.
“I’m not against readin
g.” Eileen returned the hug. “I just think you’re all missing out on the best part of being on vacation—getting out, doing things. Michael, honey, weren’t you going to drive Mike over to the fort?”
“Sure. If he wants to see it. You want to see Fort Morgan, champ?”
“That’d be neat.” The enthusiasm in the words was only marginally reflected in the manner of their delivery.
Michael Senior clapped his hands together. “Okay, and this afternoon, you kids are going over to the Hangout and play some Skee-Ball, and then we’ll have hamburgers at the Pink Pony Pub, and…”
Eileen sighed. She exchanged a look of frustration with her son. Michael Junior was back in Middle-earth. Julia had returned to The Other, and her younger sister, Donna, was creeping warily up to the temporarily abandoned Exorcist as if it were something to be conquered through dint of will and intestinal fortitude. Donna had been told by her friend, Sherell, who had already read the book, that there was projectile vomiting in there.
Everyone took to the waters for a few minutes at least and allowed the surf to knock them off their feet—for a bit. Michael Junior tried to build a sandcastle and ended up with a sand hogan with no windows. And later, just as their father had ordered, there were greasy vacation hamburgers at the Pink Pony Pub, and Skee-Ball at the Hangout, and all the tickets dispensed by the old-fashioned Skee-Ball bowling machines were pooled and redeemed for a plastic Hawaiian hula dancer, and this went to Donna because her wildly bowled wooden ball had hit a Coca-Cola clock and knocked the minute hand off and she had been mortified with embarrassment.
That night Michael Senior and his mother, Eileen, and his three children, whose mother lived in London with her second husband, a network television news correspondent, ate fried shrimp and crab claws at the Sea-n-Suds restaurant down the beach from their motel. Each of the three offspring of Michael Cameron tried their best to be glib and engaging at the table, as dinner conversation meandered from New Orleans and the late, great Louis Armstrong to the subject of Jim Morrison, the lead singer for the rock-and-roll band The Doors, who only a few days earlier had been found dead at the young age of twenty-seven in his bathtub. Michael Senior had not been familiar with the details of Mr. Morrison’s untimely demise, the actual cause still open to speculation, while Eileen Cameron was unclear as to whom Jim Morrison even was, and wondered if he’d ever played the trumpet or sang in a phlegmy voice like Louis.