It’s easy to fool Southern moms, though. (We fooled them when they were daughters and nothing’s changed, right?) Sweet talk about how wonderful the mashed potatoes, gravy, and rabbit stew taste works every time. Unfortunately, unlike Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver, Southern men have to prove they mean what they say by actually eating the stuff.
However, here’s the good news. Whatever you must endure to date a Southern woman, she will compensate you for your hardship and make it worthwhile. Southern women are truly the hottest creatures on earth, even with the windows open in midwinter. Their butts don’t get cold until after marriage. Here’s the good deal: You don’t have to woo them much. Southern romance does not necessarily mean you have to buy presents or take your date somewhere nice. Saying, “You’re prettier than a blue tick hound,” will do just fine. Or, for that special occasion, “Your feet don’t stink near as badly as my brother’s.” When you fall in love with a Northern girl, you have to send her flowers and candy and cards. When you fall in love with a Southern woman you just spray-paint her name on a water tower, an overpass, or a big rock—it all depends on your town’s tradition. But this much is universal: Whether it’s having sex or catching a fish, it doesn’t mean anything until you tell someone. True love means “Say It with Krylon.”
I once was so in love that I spray-painted a girl’s name on the outside wall of the high school gymnasium. Unfortunately, it was only four feet off the ground. Not too impressive. Eye level does not equal everlasting passion. To have real impact you must stand a damn good chance of dying in the trying, or at least of walking with a limp for the rest of your life. In Hapeville the water tower was the true-love proving ground. If someone climbed to the top in the dead of night—during daylight the cops got upset—to declare his ardor, everyone knew it was serious.
By the way, the key word in the preceding sentence is “everyone.” Less than an hour after the sun rose on a new name on the water tower, everyone in town knew the young folks involved. Once, after a midnight spray-painting run, I walked down the street and a complete stranger said, “Hey, nice job on the water tower last night.”
I grinned and never heard the words “water tower” at all.
I liked girls early. Just about every young lady in the fifth and sixth grades wore my ID bracelet. Well, every cute one. It meant we were going together. It didn’t mean we ever spoke on the phone or appeared in public together. Maybe we’d indulge in some intense cross-classroom staring during homeroom, but that was about as steamy as it got.
My only problem was that I was too shy to approach a potential steady myself. So I’d get Larry Burns to do it for me. Larry, as you know, would do anything.
I’d say, “Larry, will you ask Ellen Harrison if she’ll go with me?” A while later he’d come back and say, “Yes, she’ll go with you.”
“Okay, give her my ID bracelet.”
Two weeks later Larry would hand back the bracelet and say, “Now she’s gonna go with [insert boy’s name here].”
Thank goodness Larry took his job seriously or I’d have had to spend all my allowance on cheap jewelry.
This is the only advice that my father, Big Jim, ever gave me.
“Son, the day will come when women won’t sleep with you on a $1,000 bet. I don’t care if it costs you your job or your health or your life: When you get on a hot streak, ride…it…out.”
It was a Father Knows Best moment. I swear.
Otherwise, Big Jim didn’t tell me much about women or, on a more basic level, sex. We never had the conversation parents should have with their children even if the children know more than their folks. Of course, I would never know as much as Big Jim. His mother once swore to me that when he was six years old, she’d caught him in a cornfield doing “something” with a local girl. Can you imagine that? When I was playing with GI Joes, Big Jim was playing with…no. It’s not a picture I want to think about. No wonder he never told me about sex. He probably just assumed everyone did it at six.
My mother never told me about sex, either. I guess she was easily embarrassed. It makes sense. She went to church five days a week and is still the most conservative woman I know. Instead of a frank discussion about procreation (a strange word since we all begin as amateurs), my mom decided to bring home a pamphlet for me from the pediatrician. It was about boys turning into wolves. I didn’t get it. I checked the mirror for facial hair. Seeing none, I decided not to worry about it.
Fortunately for everyone, I learned about sex on my own, and in the same way most boys do: in the street. Late one afternoon, during the summer before the fourth grade, my next-door neighbor, Brad, sat next to me on a curb and discussed the facts of life. Brad and I were the same age, but he’d already gotten the facts. We knew they were the facts because they came straight from his older brother, Rick. Rick was in the sixth grade. Then Brad said that Rick had a telescope. Now I knew for sure that he knew.
According to Rick, sex went like this: You got married. Then you got in your car, drove to a place where there weren’t a lot of other cars, and parked. Then you unzipped your pants, you got on top of your wife, you put yourself inside her (he didn’t elaborate about exactly where), you peed, and you drove back home.
I was perfectly fine with all of this.
My only question was why it had to be in a car. Why couldn’t you do it in a house? But Brad said that’s the way it had come down from his brother, and we knew that it had to be right.
Later that night I lay in bed and thought about the glories of sex. I also knew I’d forever miss them because there was no way I could ever pee inside anybody.
I knew you put “it” in “something,” but I didn’t know exactly where or what that something was. I finally learned when one guy in our group—yes, it was Larry Burns—reported on an actual close encounter with that particular animal.
He stunned us with its location.
Larry said, “It’s much lower than you think it is.”
We had previously imagined that the girl’s “it” was almost like a second navel, but Larry set us straight. Then we couldn’t get it out of our minds. (I’ve also never gotten over how he’d actually encountered the real thing in the eighth grade.)
Until then I’d been satisfied just watching cheerleaders jump high at football games and wishing that I owned a bike so I could date. Now it was even worse. I had to have that bike!
As a kid, I often wondered how you could ever sleep with somebody and then, without giggling, actually speak to them in front of other people. Wouldn’t you only think about what you had just done, whether it was five minutes or five days earlier?
Boy, life teaches you how wrong you can be. It’s entirely possible. Not only can you do it with somebody and look at them without giggling, you can also change your phone number and move just to get away from them when they start making plans for the rest of your lives together.
“I’m sorry. The number you dialed is no longer a working number. Please check the number and try again. This is a recording.”
I kissed my first girl in the first quarter of the ninth grade. I also shot my first squirrel then. Cross your fingers that I don’t get these stories confused.
Carrie Ann Campbell (the girl) was a real cutie at College Park High School. She lived three blocks from me, and one day I asked if I could walk her home. She said yes. Standing on her front steps, I kissed her—smack—quickly. She didn’t seem to mind, so I did it three days in a row. On the fourth day, before I could kiss her, she invited me in. I’d have felt like Casanova had I’d known who Casanova was. Instead I felt like Barney Fife getting lucky. Inside, I was about to kiss Carrie Ann in the hallway when she stopped me and said, “Wait. You don’t know how to kiss.”
Suddenly I felt like Barney Fife in a swirl of skunk vapor at point-blank range. Then Carrie Ann surprised me and said she’d show me how to do it right.
I am so grateful.
French kissing was amazing. Back then I could kiss Carrie Ann fo
r four hours and do nothing else. Or possibly I was just rationalizing because I figured that there was no chance in all of Greater Atlanta that Carrie Ann would ever let me do much of anything else. No, I really didn’t mind. I’ve always been a pragmatic guy, interested in investing for the long term. If I could kiss Carrie Ann for four hours, perhaps one day she’d let me rub the outside of her sweater. So what if my faith in the future was remarkably similar to that of a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal?
“Do you want to risk everything for what’s behind door number three, or do you want to keep what you’ve got?”
I wanted to keep what I had. I didn’t want to go too far and have a girl say, “You know what? You’re an animal. You’re not getting any of this. I’m taking away the kissing and the outside of the sweater because you tried to go inside the sweater.”
Now, of course, everything has changed. I read in the newspaper that the rule at some colleges today is that people who want to make out must ask permission to move ahead each step of the way. I don’t think this would work in the South.
HE: Can I kiss yer neck?
SHE: Oh, baby.
HE: I’m gonna stick my tongue in yer mouth.
SHE: Only a little…Oh God…
HE: Where does this damn bra unsnap?
SHE: Here, let me.
And later…
HE: Why the hell cain’t you wear jeans with buttons?
SHE: It’s not my fault that the zipper’s stuck. Now get off me you…you…fat…
HE: But baby, you know I luv yew.
SHE: Hold on. What’s that smell? Did you spill Buck Lure in this car?
HE: Worked, didn’t it?
Let me catch my breath.
Carrie Ann and I were as seriously involved as ninth graders could be, but being from Georgia I know that there are also kids who, at that age, are actually having baby showers. Pregnancy and parents with shotguns can really make the ninth grade hard. I was lucky with Carrie Ann because her parents never interfered. To be honest, I never actually knew how her parents felt about me because I’d never met them. I’ve since realized that Carrie Ann had no parents and lived in her big house all alone.
My routine with Carrie Ann Campbell was pretty much: get up, go to school, get out of school, kiss—we’d sit on the couch for hours after class, just making out—go home, eat dinner, go to bed. Sometimes I’d call her at night. We even exchanged ninth grade photos. I didn’t write “I love you” or anything on the back. I just signed my name.
One day, after a couple hours of swapping spit in her basement, I finally put my hand under Carrie Ann’s sweater. I’m lying. She put my hand under her sweater. It’s the truth and an important lesson: Long term investment pays off. Guess what? She was wearing another sweater. But hey, if door number three opens, you stroll on in. At that moment life really, really changed. I walked home from her house and passed a woman watering her lawn. I looked at her and thought, “You know, I know what I’m doing now. You’d better be careful. I could wreck your home.”
Carrie Ann and I went together until I decided I missed the guys at Hapeville High and started riding the city bus back there. Long distance relationships don’t work, and Hapeville and College Park were four miles apart. Four miles is too far to ride a bicycle, especially when you can’t spend the night. So we had to break up. It was tragic and it took Carrie Ann at least a couple of hours to get over me.
Carrie Ann ended up with Buddy Hammond. There was even talk of getting married someday. His wedding gift to her was going to be a set of handmade, all-leather luggage with fur handles. Buddy’s grandfather died still wondering what had become of his prize milk cows and his squirrel tail collection.
Even if I hadn’t switched schools, my romance with Carrie Ann would have ended. I was ready to say, “I think we should see other people.” You realize, of course, that nobody ever says that without actually having another person in mind.
I had my eye on Kellie Joyce, who lived in Hapeville. She was a year older than I was. Kellie and I had talked while sitting on the grass outside the public tennis courts, and I had a pretty good feeling that she would kiss me had I not been involved with Carrie Ann. So “I think we should see other people” meant for me to go home that night and call Kellie Joyce.
Kellie agreed to go out with me. I went to her house and met her parents. She actually had parents, which was a new thing for me. After I’d settled into their living room couch, her dad said, “Now, who is your mother?”
Having a conversation with a dad is uncomfortable. (A dad hanging around is unusual. Usually, the Southern father unloads a couple of mean, knowing glares and then sulks quietly away to the garage.)
“Carole Foxworthy.”
“What was her name before she was married?”
“Camp.”
Her dad jumped up and said, “Your mother is who?”
I repeated myself. “Carole Camp.”
“What’s her phone number?!” he said. I gave him the number and he started dialing. I thought, “Oh my God, what have I done?! Mom’s got a prison record I don’t know about!” Turns out both Mr. and Mrs. Joyce had gone to high school with my mom.
“God, isn’t that ironic,” Mrs. Joyce said. “Twenty years later and now our kids are going out.”
I later found out that Kellie was my half-sister, which made her even more appealing.
I’m kidding.
If any of you still wonder whether I’m a true Redneck, this long-repressed secret should convince you. Believe me, I never thought it could happen to me. A long time ago, I was attracted to my cousin.
We were only fourteen and we had spent the day at a family reunion. You know the routine: swim and hang out all day, and then eat lunch off concrete picnic tables. Afterward, she and I took a walk and pretty soon we were kissing. I don’t know how it happened, but I do know my brain was screaming in my ear, “You idiot. You’re kissing your cousin!”
Of course another part of me was also screaming: “Second cousin. C’mon, she’s almost a stranger! Haven’t seen her in six years!”
We cooled down short of sin and went back to our families. We didn’t talk about what happened and have never discussed it since.
I later found out she was also my half-sister. Apparently Big Jim had had the same problem a generation earlier.
Again, just kidding.
When I was in the eleventh grade I finally went out with Betty Calloway. Every guy talked about Betty Calloway. She was stunningly beautiful. Lucky for me she was also Chastain’s cousin. I have never been more nervous with a woman than before that date. I might as well have been dating Elle MacPherson and Cindy Crawford and their twin sisters.
We went to see the movie Where the Red Fern Grows. Short synopsis: dirt poor Appalachian family. The kid wants coon-hunting dogs. They have no money. The kid cuts fields for a penny. Takes him five years to save enough money. One night he runs away, takes a train, goes to this town, and buys two bloodhounds: Old Dan and Little Anne. Carves their names on a tree. Comes back and raises these dogs. They end up winning the state coon-hunting championship.
One night not long after that, they’re hunting and a cougar attacks Old Dan. They take him back home, try to nurse him. He dies. They bury Old Dan in the yard. Then Little Anne will not eat. She just lies out on Old Dan’s grave and moans. Pretty soon Little Anne dies from a broken heart. They bury her next to Old Dan.
Soon the family decides to move on. They’re loading up the wagon and the boy says, “Let me go say good-bye to my dogs one last time. At the beginning of the movie, the kid’s mother had told him a story: “And the place where the greatest love on earth is,” she said, “a red fern will grow.” So he runs over the hill and there, between the two mounds of dirt, grows a red fern.
Now, I am dating the most beautiful girl in Hapeville High and I am sobbing uncontrollably. This movie made Ol Yeller look like a comedy. I cannot quit crying on our first date. This is the saddest story I have ever seen. We
’re driving home and I’m still crying. I’m so broken up I didn’t even care about what Betty thought of my blubbering.
Finally, I parked in front of Betty’s house and started kissing her. By the way, parking in front of your date’s house is, contrary to conventional wisdom, a very smart move. You can get away with almost anything. Even if her parents look out the window and see someone’s heels pressed against the left rear passenger window, they don’t really see them because they can’t imagine you’d have the nerve to try and climb on top of their daughter right in their own driveway.
As for Betty, she kissed me enthusiastically. Apparently, not being ashamed to let her see me get in touch with my female side made her happy to let me get in touch with her female side. In fact, the kissing was so hot and heavy that she got light-headed and had to take a moment and stand outside to catch her breath. That was it for the kissing. In fact, we never went out again. Turned out she had the flu and I’d turned the car heater up too high, but it was a running joke that I kissed her so well that she almost fainted.
Technique is everything.
First you kiss for three hours. Then you move your arm up on her arm. The goal is to have the inside of your arm accidentally brush the outside of her breast. If she doesn’t shift away, you may move on. “Okay, wait a couple of minutes and bring the arm back…Oops, bumped it again. Still okay. Okay, now let’s see if we can put our hand on her side, between her waist and her chest. Still doing okay…”
The whole procedure is like monitoring a space launch.
“Okay, let’s gently ease the hand up. T-minus-8, 7, 6, 5, 4, move, grab.” Many times that’s when a young woman will launch a preprogramed counterattack and stop your hand, or move it back to its original position. With any luck her primary systems will fail and her secondary systems will be forced to take over, and your hand will be cleared for takeoff.
Often, I would proceed to T-minus-four seconds and reverse course and start again, with ever so slight variations. It was confusing and satisfying. The idea was to wear a girl down. Eventually, they got damn tired of stopping you.
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