by Robert Klein
Drinking all the free Pepsi I wanted would have been a dream when I was eleven, but these moving lines of it were endless, and I wondered if people would ever stop drinking it and give me a rest from the deafening noise and repetitive routine. The place was always two inches deep in the stuff, which was somewhat corrosive, so by summer’s end, my tough, thick work boots had turned into Egyptian sandals. The old-timers at the plant drank soda by the ton and, not surprisingly, had severe dental problems. Inversely, you could tell how long someone had worked there by how few teeth he had.
I was in the bottling department, and one of my jobs was taking flat-folded cardboard six-packs designed to hold bottles, pushing them open, and placing them four at a time into wooden cases going by on the assembly line. It was sometimes difficult to keep up, which made me feel like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, or Lucy in the chocolate factory. I repeated this motion over a thousand times a day for days on end, so that I could feel my hands forming the six-pack for years afterward and in my dreams.
Another job was watching clean empty bottles go by in front of a light, making sure they weren’t dirty or broken before they were filled. Watching bottles go by for long periods of time is a soporific of the first order, so there were periods of dozing in which broken and contaminated ones passed my station. Odd objects frequently turned up in the previously used bottles, from bracelets and condoms to love notes between Juan and Matilda. Many of the empties had spent months in the basements of Bronx candy stores, and the occasional dead mouse presented itself: a collector’s item. For some time afterward, I would thoroughly inspect any Pepsi before I drank it, fearing that it had been produced on my watch.
All in all, I had never wanted so badly for school to start. Seeing Judy only on weekends, the rivers of Pepsi, and the routine of getting up every day at six A.M. and counting the minutes to that five o’clock whistle made me long for college life.
I purchased a suit on my own for the first time, from Paul Sargents in Greenwich Village: a banker’s double-breasted stripe, but far from conservative in cut. It was called a Continental suit and was very hip; the jacket was short and barely covered my buttocks. It cost $69.95, most of a week’s salary, and I brought it home knowing my father would scrutinize it thoroughly, as an expert on garments and fabrics. He had always accompanied me and paid for clothing, and I was prepared for him to nitpick, though I vowed to shrug it off.
He took it out of the box and rubbed the lapels, the shoulder pads, and the lining. “How much did you pay for this?”
“Sixty-nine ninety-five.”
“Yoy ishtanem! They saw you coming! They saw you coming! [He imitated a moron with a funny walk.] They said here’s someone coming with money who doesn’t know anything about suits. It’s garbage, this suit. A piece of crap.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Look at this lapel stitching: cheap. Crappy buckram in the shoulder pads, probably reprocessed wool.”
“What’s buckram?”
“The stuff in shoulder pads.”
“Who cares? I like the suit.”
“Who cares? Who cares? You spent seventy dollars on a piece of shit.”
“But it’s my seventy dollars.”
“Don’t be a wise guy.”
He’d gotten my dander up once again, a little reminder of who was the grown-up and who was the child. Once again, he couldn’t accept the mistakes made in another rite of passage for a young man. Was I being unfair? Maybe. Of course I loved him, but I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
* * *
Ah, sweet autumn in the country, the bracing air, the sentimental carillon bells playing the alma mater, and everyone reading Franny and Zooey. College life fit me like an old glove now; I, the big wheel. I was elected social chairman of Kappa Nu, which meant that I would plan the parties, buy the kegs and booze, and hire those great black musicians from Buffalo for the big weekends.
I got a fair number of accolades for my performances in the plays from people who had never attended them before; the kind of respect usually accorded a good campus athlete. My schoolwork was well under control, with excellent grades, and I shortly got some fine news: Yale had accepted me. And of course there was Judy. Stan Friedman and I took an off-campus apartment together. I tried my hand at directing a one-act play, Crawling Arnold, by Jules Feiffer. It was the American premiere of the work, about a neurotic man clinging to his childhood. For years afterward, it would be the opening topic with the wonderful Jules at New York cocktail parties, that I had directed his premiere. The experience was enlightening, but I found that I couldn’t shake my actor’s instinct, so while watching the performance, I found myself wanting to take the stage and play all the parts myself. The Footlight Club concluded its season with Rashomon, the story of a Japanese bandit from ancient times. In a continuation of my Japanese specialty, I portrayed the bandit: There were no Jews in this play. I almost poked someone’s eye out during the sword fight, but the production was well received.
It was inevitable. In March, Judy and I were pinned. In contrast to my experiences at previous ceremonies, I didn’t find this one the least bit funny. The turnout was good, the singing as usual left much to be desired, and I went for the whole thing emotionally, hook, line, and sinker. As I put the pin on her chest, looking into her eyes, I thought the boys sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. A definite bridge had been crossed in our relationship, which was now more sanctified, the commitment more firm.
Meanwhile, Stan Friedman, my roommate, had gotten himself a nice girlfriend, a math-major Theta Chi sorority sister of Judy’s named Karen Cummings. She was from Endicott, like my friend Bob Matolka, and she and Stan really hit it off. She was also a Roman Catholic, so Stan dared not tell his mother, who, to put it mildly, would have vigorously objected and disowned him.
An idea popped up among the four of us, a daring exciting notion to go to Niagara Falls for a weekend. It would require courage, secrecy, careful strategic planning, and lying through our teeth. Any way you looked at it, this was heavy stuff for all of us, very much against the rules, with potentially serious consequences. Nevertheless, we were all keen, besotted with romance, and decided to do it, picking a weekend in April.
In the weeks before D-day, the four of us were all smiles and conspiratorial winks. The plan was for the girls to sign out for the weekend, pretending to be going home in order to circumvent curfew; Stan and I would pick them up in my car at a secluded place near campus. Unmarried couples did not rent motel rooms without questions and opprobrious glances in 1962, so we planned to buy cheap wedding bands at a Woolworth’s on the way. The night before, Judy and I talked about the trip as if it were a honeymoon, but left unspoken was what sleeping in the same room and marriage bands implied. There was a nervous anticipation, like the feeling one must get before parachuting from a plane (a feeling there was little chance I would ever experience).
After class on Friday at about one o’clock, we gathered in the car and successfully scooted out of town without being seen (the girls in the backseat crouched down out of sight), west toward Niagara. Once we were safely on the road, Stan joined Karen in the backseat, and my honey sat shotgun for the two-hour journey. In Scio, New York, a tiny town that looked like it had been built in frontier times, we spotted a five-and-dime. We discovered that we had not discussed the logistics of the ring purchase, a crucial element of the operation. Should one of us go in or a couple? Either way, we could arouse suspicion in a clerk or a nosy customer. Why was a young man buying a fifty-cent imitation gold wedding band? Would a young couple, even in Scio, have bought such a sacred keepsake in a Woolworth’s?
My car was amply stickered with the Alfred University name and logo: Some snooping prude might put two and two together and report us. It had happened before. “All right, you kids hold it right there. Hello? Operator, get me Alfred University. Hello, Dean Whitlow? I’ve got four of your students here trying to buy phony wedding bands. Yeah, that’s right. Pr
obably trying to shack up out of wedlock.”
Karen made a suggestion: “Why don’t you or Stan tell them you’re getting married tomorrow and the real ring has been misplaced?”
“Why would I be getting two of them?” I asked.
Karen said, “You’ve been so careless that you want an extra ring in case you lose another one.”
“Too complicated, they won’t believe that,” said Stan.
“Maybe we only need one ring,” said Karen. “We could check in to the motel separately, and once a couple is inside, they can pass the ring to the other couple.”
“Too complicated,” said Stan. “We need two rings.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Anyway, we’ll have to go in and out of the motel. What if one of the girls is seen without a wedding ring?”
“Maybe we should get four rings and you boys wear them, too,” said Judy.
“Is that necessary?” I said. “My father doesn’t wear one.”
“Mine does,” said Judy.
“So does mine,” said Karen.
“Mine, too,” said Stan.
It was decided that I would go in alone and purchase four wedding rings, the explanation for which was up to my improvisational mind, if indeed an explanation was needed. There was always the happy possibility that I would see what I want, take it to the cashier, and leave without comment, sneer, or confrontation.
I entered the store with the mentality of a criminal pulling off a job, and soon located a counter with dozens of rings: diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, all under two dollars. There were many engagement rings, but being engaged wouldn’t do us any good, we had to be married. I looked and looked, but there were no wedding bands. Then I heard those dreaded words: “Can I help you, sir?” The woman was speaking in a Scio accent, so I decided to answer her in the same dialect, to avoid being downstate conspicuous. “Oh, hi, yeah. We’re heeaving a castume perty, and I’m looking fer those . . . what do you coll thim . . . those little rings theat people put an ther fingers when they’re merried?”
“YOU MEAN WEDDING BANDS?” she said, a little too loudly.
“Uh, yeah, but nat real ones, for goodness sake, just cheap fake ones. Lerd, we’re nat merried, we’re just pretending for the castume perty.”
“What ere you going eas?” she asked.
“Oh, Romeo and Juliet . . . and her parents.”
“Theat’s vury original,” she said as she pulled out a tray with phony wedding bands. “You wahnt diamonds er gold?” she said.
This was getting complicated and I glanced around to make sure no one was watching me. “Anything. How about diamonds fer Juliet and Mrs. Capulet and gold for the men?” I said, anxious to get moving.
“Wull, in theat case, you better take two diamond engagement rings, too. Girls nermally wear engagement rings with diamond wedding bands like these,” she said.
“Good idea. I’ll take these two, and these and those. That’s six, right?”
“Yeah. But eren’t these diamond ones too madern for Romeo eand Juliet?”
“No, I don’t think so, they’re fine. I’ll take um.”
“Okeydoke.”
She rang up the rings on the noisy cash register. “Sex dallers eand sex cents.” She put them in a bag and I was off. “I hope you win fer best castume,” she said as I darted out the door to the getaway car.
On the road again, we divided up the loot like the John Dillinger gang. “These engagement rings are the phoniest-looking things I ever saw,” said Judy.
Karen agreed. “They don’t look real. They’ll attract more attention and suspicion if we wear them,” she said.
“Why don’t they just wear the wedding bands?” said Stan.
“The girl in the store said this kind of band is always worn with a ring like those,” I said.
“Why didn’t you get all gold ones?” Judy asked.
“I thought it would look suspicious if we all had on exactly the same band.”
“I don’t think what she said is necessarily true, that we have to wear two rings,” said Karen.
“Maybe in Scio it’s the custom that if you have a fifty-cent wedding band, you have to wear a two-dollar engagement ring,” I said.
It was decided that the girls would go with the bands only. There was much self-conscious giggling as we put on the rings and contemplated our fingers, though none of them fit properly and were jerry-rigged with Band-Aids to stay on.
Before long, we were in the vicinity of Niagara, though still a few miles from the falls. Much to my surprise, it was an incredibly ugly area of industrial sites, some abandoned, that were built to take advantage of the cheap power source. Somehow I did not expect such eyesores so close to one of the most beautiful places on earth. Then we saw an assortment of motels advertising vacancies and had to decide on which one and how to pass as married. “Just look bored with each other,” I quipped.
“That’s not funny,” Judy said. “You won’t be bored,” and she gave me a little kiss.
We pulled up in front of a decent-looking place with “Niagara” in the name and gave one another an “Are you ready?” look. We decided to enter together; going in as separate couples could raise a red flag if someone noticed that we came in one car. The lobby was done up in rustic wood, with a large American flag and an appropriate deer head staring at us as we approached. At least he wouldn’t tell. The place smelled a little damp, like wood that had survived another ferocious western New York winter, and the unsmiling survivor behind the desk looked like just the kind of son of a bitch who would turn us in. He was about fifty, American Gothic, with a cowboy string tie. “Good afternoon, checking in?”
“Yes, uh . . . the four of us,” I said. “That is, two couples.”
“Newlyweds?”
Karen was about to say yes when I cut her off: “No. We’ve been married for two years, and they’ve been married for one. We’re just getting away, you know, for the weekend . . . see the falls . . . left the kid with my mother-in-law.”
Judy and Stan were about to choke, while Karen, an incessant giggler, almost broke out laughing. But the guy pushed the register forward for me to sign. I signed the predecided “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Henry, New York City.” Stan signed “Mr. and Mrs. Charles MacDonald, Hackensack, New Jersey.” He looked like a Charles MacDonald like I looked like a Wong Fong, but the guy paid no mind and gave us the keys. We felt an urge to run to the rooms and private sanctuary, but we walked nonchalantly, to look normal and unassuming. We split up, and I closed and locked the door behind Judy and me, forgoing the urge to carry her over the threshold. Alone at last, we fell down on the bed, clenching and grabbing. Judy suddenly interrupted: “Let’s see the falls first. I really want to see the falls.”
“You’re right, I want to see them, too. But we have to wait until this bulge in my pants goes down before I’m presentable in public.”
I knocked on the MacDonalds’ door, and they had the same desire to see Niagara Falls that the Henrys did, so off we went. The beauty and power of these falls was beyond unbelievable, beyond stunning. Judy and I wrapped around each other in the chilly spray and wind, against the incessant roar. Standing there together amid such majesty, I felt like the cascades were performing just for us, like a thunderous cosmic show; and when we left, they would rest until we returned. It was small wonder that honeymoon couples came here to feel alone even among people.
We went to the Canadian side, whose vista was even more gorgeous, and saw a couple of red-clad Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which made me realize that this was my first trip outside the United States. We had a nice dinner in Ontario and, broadened by travel to a foreign land, we returned to our new home, the lovely Room 120 at the Niagara Something Motel.
Upon locking the door, we looked in each other’s eyes. We kissed, we lay down together, and slowly, we removed each other’s clothing in the semidarkness. “We’d better hurry, it’s close to curfew,” I whispered as I kissed her breasts.
“Yes, the h
ouse mother’s coming to get me. She ought to see me now,” Judy whispered back as she ran her hand down my thigh. For a while, we could hear only our breathing and the little slurping sounds made by eager lips and tongues. A few cars whizzed by on the road, their headlights sending momentary dancing pools of light across the window shade. It was all so gentle, taking our time like this, and while I was hot as could be, I was in no hurry. We were naked, entwined like a kudzu vine around a slender tree. I had to speak, I simply had to speak: “Judy, I love you.”
“I love you very much,” she whispered back. “Do you have protection?”
“Of course, that was in the plan,” I said as I leaped out of bed, looking like the letter L, and grabbed a package of prophylactics from my bag. My hands were a little unsteady as I unwrapped the thing and tried to put it on. She assisted me, taking care that it was rolled as high as possible. She lay down and beckoned me with outstretched arms and the most beautiful look on her face: part smile, with the slightest glistening of moisture in her eyes.
I was inside her now, though we were really inside each other. I was in a new place, a place I belonged, and it felt like home. How do I describe it? I had enough trouble describing Niagara Falls. The two experiences were similar in grandeur and emotion, power and permanence; I felt that a monumental event had occurred, and that I would be making love like this to her for the rest of my life. Though the sex by itself was exciting, I had never experienced the awesome combination of love and sex that I’d heard about all my life. Before Judy, sex as a concept had been naughty, lacking in romance, and romance as a concept had been sexless. It occurred to me that before we began dating, when I was worshiping Judy from afar, I had never even had a sexual fantasy about her, but rather a vision of us married, with adorable kids bouncing on our knees. Making love to Judy was tender and sexy at the same time: the perfect combination of naughty and nice.