While most people move somewhere for a job or due to a job I wanted to live in Indiana because I wanted to go Indiana University and it was cheaper to go to IU as an in-state student rather than an out of state student (me being a moron at the time I could have gone to the University of Texas for around $50.00 per term rather than the thousands of dollars at IU something I could and should have availed myself of as a Texan). So my Mum, my sister, and myself packed up and moved to Camford County Indiana where my mum got a job working at a local 3M factory. Dad stayed behind in Dallas because of his job. He had a good paying managerial job that he had moved up to step-by-step while working for Philips in Big D.
I wanted to go to IU because that was where my father had gone to university in the 1950s. Dad loved IU, he loved Bloomington, and and he loved telling me over and over again how much he loved both IU and Bloomington. As I listened to Dad talk to me over and over again over during my teen years about his years at IU I increasingly imagined myself living amidst the rolling hills, dense forests, limestone hills, and limestone fences and buildings of IU, Bloomington, and Monroe County, Indiana. When I did finally matriculate at IU I did, in fact, love living amidst the rolling hills, dense forests, limestone walls and buildings of Bloomington and Monroe County. What I didn't love was the subtropical climate of the place with its high humidity. It was simply not a good place for someone with respiratory problems like myself to live.
Speaking of respiratory problems:,I got severe asthma suddenly when I was twelve. My asthma was so severe that I was hospitalised many times over the years, too many to count, in fact, Hospitalisations only ended when I was put on a regimen of Advair and Singulair sometime in the 1990s.
At first having asthma wasn't that bad thanks to the cortisone my Methodist Hospital doctor put me on. I could even continue running track while being on it. After the cortisone began to cause problems, however, it made my face cheeks puff up, it meant that I could no longer run track and it meant that I had difficulty even walking up the stairs from the first to the second and the third storeys of the Browne Junior High that I went to. Eventually, my doctor replaced the cortisone with a nebuliser which I had to take three times a day and then clean it so I was pretty much housebound for much of my teen years because I really didn't feel very well and the cleaning process for the nebuliser was a complicated and arduous one.
It was my asthma perhaps more than anything else that made me an introvert, a loner, and a sickly housebound kid. All these, in turn, made me someone who was not the kind of person didn't have a lot of friends but who did listen to a lot of music. Now don't get me wrong, I did have a few of what I called friends that I hung out with. John Celino was my best friend in Dallas and he and I hung with each other during school and after. He and I bonded over the Beatles, prog rock, and our opposition to the Vietnam War, which was raging at the time. I even recall that once upon a time he and I wanted to go to Robert E. Lee Park in Dallas to protest the war but our parents, rightly I know now told us no because the cops would bash our heads in. And bash our heads in they surely would have because that is what the Dallas Police typically did to dissidents in Lee Park at the time. The Dallas cops, you see, were not known for their gentle treatment of dissident protestors and probably still aren't.
I had friends in Indiana too. When I first moved to Camford County in Indiana I hang with the two D's: Doug and Dick. We, and particularly Doug and I, bonded over music and pot. Once I stopped hanging with the three D's I hung with the two Ken's, the Ken who had moved from Hawaii to rural Indiana and who, like me, was an exile and an outcast initially because of that, and the other Ken, the Ken who was a homegrown born and raised rural Hoosier lad. It was cannabis and acid which bonded me to the two Ken's. And it was the other Ken who was indirectly responsible for me becoming a matchmaker.
Here is how it happened. One day at high school during a break in classes a girl named Teri, who I didn’t know very well, stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I would introduce her to the other Ken. She knew I hang with him. She told me she liked him and she wanted me to tell him that she liked him. At the time, I didn't tell Teri that I really didn't want to play matchmaker being someone who didn't go in for what I thought were the fantasies associated with romantic love (romantic ideologies associated with love have probably killed and injured more people than Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler combined). I was already cynical you see. Thank you asthma. Thank you Vietnam. Thank you Gulf of Tonkin. Thank you Watergate. Thank you tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Nevertheless, being shy me who needed all the acquaintances he could get I told her that I would do it and I did as I had promised her just a bit later that day when I intentionally ran into the other Ken during class break.
From the moment I told the other Ken that Teri liked him he and Teri became a couple. I didn't see either Ken or Teri much after that though I am sure I gained social capital from them both for the match made in proverbial heaven. I would occasionally see them in the high school halls holding hands and doing what couples typically do, public displays of attraction.
One day at school Ken stopped me between class break and asked me if I would trade cars with him the upcoming Friday evening. I had an MGB. Ken had an Opel GT. The other other Ken had a Triumph. We were the two and a half foreign sports car having musketeers, me being the half since they hung with each other more then they hang with me. When I asked Ken why he wanted my car he told me that he and Teri were turning a wish they had into a reality; they wanted to screw in all the cars they could before they graduated from high school. Mine was the next car in line for the Ken and Teri screwfest.
Of course, introverted me really didn't want to do the car exchange thing anymore than I wanted to play matchmaker to Teri and Ken. I dnd not like to loan my stuff out fearing that I would never get it back or if I did get it back it would be damaged (both happened to my stuff too many times in my life). Nor did I want the detritus of love to spoil my car (some might suggest that an MG could not and would not be spoiled anymore than it already was by such escapades but that is another story). As usual shy and lonely me gave in I told Ken that I would trade cars with him.
Ken told me to meet him later that night at Teri's place which was right across from the fairgrounds in the Camford County county seat. At the appointed hour on a beautiful warm spring evening I drove my car as planned to Teri’s and knocked on the door. Ken was not there yet.
As I entered the house I saw Teri out of the corner of my eyes over in the corner of the living room surrounded by three young women. The three young women appeared to be playing courtier to Teri's Queen preparing her for the evening's ritual love making activities. Teri, and I remember this well for what should be obvious reasons, was dressed in an orange halter top and a pair of green short shorts. I don’t think we called them hot pants yet. Queen Teri's courtiers were making the final adjustments to her kit, what little there was of it that is. What it definitely was was an easy access pass for sex with Ken later that night.
As I sat on the couch I couldn’t help but look again and again at Teri though I tried, as we often did in those days and times, not to. It just wasn't kosher to stare at someone you were trying to eye in secret (though you often did get caught doing it). It was the first time that I really saw Teri, REALLY SAW Teri. I saw that she had an amazing body. Her legs were gorgeous. Her free range breasts, which were sizeable but not oversized, were bouncing this way and that way and up and then down, and I loved bouncing breasts for some obscure reason at the time and still do. Her tanned skin was beautiful save for the rectangular patches of blackheads on her face which I am sure she tried to get rid of but couldn't. We all did at this age. Luckily I had a father who loved to squeeze them. I never realised, until that moment, how attractive and beautiful and sexy Teri was. I an sure I fell in lust with her that very minute of that very day.
About fifteen minutes later Ken arrived and after switching cars I left in his Opel while he and Teri left in my MGB. I imagined Teri and Ken heading out to the rural boonies to have sex in my MGB, assuming it started which it did not always do. The next day we traded cars back and I headed home with Teri again on my mind .She rarely left it for the several days after.
After graduation from high school I didn’t see Teri or Ken at all, something that often happens when you leave high school (see Buffy season four). I was planning on going to college but I had to put college on hold for the time being for some mysterious reason that escapes me now, and started instead working at a factory in town like so many others of my generation did at this stage in their lives. Dad and Mum got the job for me. (Don't you just love networks of power and privilege?) I later heard from someone, I don't remember who, who told me that Teri and Ken had gotten married. I was not invited to the wedding, of course despite being the one who had introduced them. Oh well such is the life of a sickly introverted loner.
One day, I think it was a Friday, my sister and I ran into Ken and Teri in town. All four of us were doing the ritual circling of the downtown square of Camford City before we got stoned, went to the basketball game, and went to Pizza King with what seemed like every other high schooler in the county. We were going clockwise around the square; they were going counterclockwise. They invited us to their trailer outside of town to drop some acid.
Like so many of the kids of my generation I dropped acid and mescaline and smoked a lot of grass during my high school years. We came to Ken and Teri's. We dropped acid. We got really high. We listened to a lot of music. We ate a lot of potato chips. I saw.
I saw Teri again, really saw her again. This time she was dressed in newish Levi’s, the jeans of choice for my generation, and a white Oxford shirt. She didn’t have a bra on and you could see her beautiful breasts quite clearly through the thin almost transparent fabric of her shirt. She looked amazing. Thank god for white shirts! I could not take my I am trying to keep them secret eyes off her. She was so sexy.
I saw something else that winter night as well. I saw something that deeply disturbed me. I saw Ken abuse, or what I would call abuse, Teri. I don’t know whether it was the LSD that made Ken do the things he was doing to Teri. It sometimes did with those I knew who dropped acid. I hoped it was the acid but I had a sneaky suspicion that it wasn’t and that it was what Ken was really like in private (the acid turned the private into the public). He grabbed her breasts hard in front of my sister and myself so hard that she screamed in pain. When she asked him to stop he manhandled her even more. He was a big guy. He eventually did stop trying to force Teri to do what he wanted in front of me and my sister, probably because of me and my sister, but the damage was done at least on my end. Teri asked me to stay the night, hoping, I suspect, that it would keep Ken from doing more of the same or even worse to her later that night.
My sister and I slept on the two sofas Teri and Ken had in the living room of their single large trailer. It was hard for me to sleep not simply because of the acid high, something that usually kept me up all night, and because of what Ken did to Teri, but also because I was so turned on by Teri. I had been turned on by other women before, one or two as I recall, but nothing like this. I was beginning to wish that Teri and I were a couple.
My sister and I left early the next morning. Teri was awake already and offered us something to eat, we declined, and bid us goodbye. Ken was still in bed.
I didn’t see Teri again until well into the summer. I was preparing to head back to Dallas before I started uni at the University of Texas in Austin. By this time Indiana and Indiana University and Bloomington Indiana were causing me so many health problems that I decided to go back home, so many health problems that my doctor told me to apply for medicaid, which I did without success. I did run into Teri one day in town and she invited me out for lunch at her trailer. Ken wasn't there. He was doing his usual thing which generally involved cars, drugs, or some combination of the two.
It was the first time I really got to know Teri as something other than a sex object. We had a great time eating, talking, laughing, and bonding. I remember her saying how surprised at how funny I could be. I may have been an introvert but I was an introverted devotee of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief album (definitely a hoot when you are high) so I could be funny in that Monty Python sort of way sometimes.
As I left the trailer I told Teri I was off to Dallas and, after that, to uni in Austin. The factory life was not for me. She followed me into town in her car, a monster of a car, as I recall, one of those whale sized Lincoln's I think. My sister told me later that Teri had run out of petrol and was trying frantically and desperately to flag me down so I could pick her up and take her into town to get some gas but to no avail. I was, I suppose, daydreaming about Teri and being with Teri. By that time, you see, I had fallen in love with her but being the too shy introvert I was I was afraid to tell her I loved her and I was afraid of, as I always was when it came to dating, being hurt. And of course, there was the fact that she was already married.
I haven't seen Teri since that summer day. I did think of her and still do quite often. I did see Ken once, I was back in Indiana hanging with my best friend Steve. Steve drove us down to a ghost town called Elizabethtown on the Mississnewa River in Delaware County. It was one of the places we used to go to to marvel at a bridge that had fallen into the Mississnewa, a fitting symbol for what became of the town, to check out the cemetery there, another fitting symbol of the town that had died at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to smoke some pot. The other place we went to do all three was the thirteen graves.
As Steve and I walked toward the downed and partially drowned Elizabethtown bridge I noticed someone in the distance walking toward us. As I got closer I could see it was Ken. As we moved closer to each other Ken’s eyes briefly met mine and after a split second of recognition I averted my eyes almost immediately from his in order to avoid his gaze and his attention and kept walking toward the fallen bridge with Steve trying to hide the fact that I had indeed recognised him. I didn't want to recognise him because I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Teri that cold winter night in rural Indiana. I later heard through the gossip grapevine (our internet at the time, one that was quite effective and just as unreliable) that he and Teri had divorced. It was way to late for me by this time.
After college I never returned to my rural Indiana home ever again. And I am glad I never did. The oil crises, globalisation, and deindustrialisation took their revenge on the city, town, and already poor villages of the county. Businesses went out of business or left for climes with cheaper labour costs and better weather. The once vibrant downtown that we circled around this way and that every Friday was decimated and has never, so I am told, recovered. Retail establishments went out of business and the buildings downtown began to literally fall down, some with the help of a wrecking ball. After uni I returned instead to Dallas, well suburban Dallas, Duncanville to be precise, which, like Big D itself, saw more and more people and more and more businesses arrive every week, so many, in fact, that the sunbelt city began to stretch almost all the way to the border with Oklahoma and further and further south in the direction of Waco and Austin.
Though I have never been back to Indiana since I have never forgotten Teri. She has always remained somewhere in my mind ever since. Even today, some sixty years later, I still think about her and think about what might have been. She still lives vividly in my 85 year old brain. But then so much of life is about what might have been isn’t it? I am just happy that what might have been for me was not the occupation (or is it vocation?) of matchmaker even though I did successfully match Ken and Teri one day long ago and once upon a time in the not so magical world or rural Indiana.
No comments:
Post a Comment