This is an account of an actual event in my life, one that was both whimsical and waggish. In the telling it also becomes a commentary on the culture I grew up in, that sometimes I feel has turned sadly to shit. While trying to keep it as faithful to my history as possible I’ve taken some license, truly only a very little, to bring it back faithfully. In this telling I metamorphose into “the boy.” Never mind, “the boy” is Jonathan, the young me.
Tonight the boy drove his new old first-car, a vintage fire-engine-red, four door, DeSoto Firedome. A massive car and styled somewhat like a tank.
He was 16. Temperature had also slipped down to 16’ F as the sun set. His breath wreathed. He was very much a cat alive in his six feet frame. It would be his first trip alone in his car outside the city. First of a hundred journeys in it through time– he would keep it for almost seven years– to a scheherazade of new places, people and adventures. Forward into a bonanza of sex.
For that trip he had to fill the tank which frightened him as that too he had never done before. Nothing about the evening to come gave him courage. He was going off into the unknown.
Tank full the boy awkwardly replaced the gas nozzle to the pump, keenly aware of his audience, the men at the pumps, the men staring critically at him from behind the station’s plate glass.
That done he went inside to pay shy of the grown up male ambiance of the place, to him something exclusive like a bar or barbershop. The man behind the register spoke up, “Want to sell the engine?”
The prize under the hood. More than this first fellow would try to buy it. A V8 Hemi Head engine, a legend. The heavy old car could roll purring forever at 100 mph. For years it would run with him from Kansas City to Dallas at top speed for hours—no problem.
It was a huge car, weighing 3,800 lbs. He knew because he’d driven it to one of the 100s of Garvey wheat elevators just that afternoon, weighing it on the truck scales. A thrill just as it had been to get so close to a small piece of the immense Garvey family empire, the greatest wheat barons of the Great Plains. More grain elevators than any others, more than 100,000 acres of wheat land, large ranches, the most oil wells in the State, and a network of filling stations to boot. The boy knew his own brother Steve had once worked on a Garvey ranch in western Kansas.
This boy was already fascinated by the enmity between poor and rich, playing out in front of him in this untidy prairie city. He already knew it was wealth that Americans most wanted even beyond their own souls. Always outside of the crowd he himself remained indifferent to the wealthy, he just like to study them, like monkeys in the zoo. He didn’t know why.
He’d have been in wonder to know that even this gas station where he shivered in the cold was owned by the Garveys, that he was pumping Garvey oil, that the station sold fortified bread made from Garvey wheat.
Wichita was a land of the rival rich—to name a few Coleman, Beech, Cessna, Lear, Garvey, and then to the town’s super wealthy Koch family. Oddly it was also an isolated bastion for a tight community of Lebanese-Syrian Christians, a well to do group and among the larger of its kind in the country. The boy went to school with many, the Colmias, Farhas and Stevens.
These families ruled the city’s oblivious middle and lower-middle working class. Wichita was also a bitter field of warring underclasses, Indians come up from Oklahoma, Mexicans, poor whites, and a black neighborhood of blight and want.
The boy strode proudly as manfully as he could back to the Firedome, waiting empty. Opening the door the boy got in, still feeling half a dozen stares dripping down the back of his neck. Closing the door he pushed the key forward. What! No ignition key slot? No steering wheel? He had climbed into the back seat. Laughter rattled the station’s plate glass.
Because the power steering was out it was a bitch for the boy to drive. Radio didn’t work. Neither did the clock. The powered motion for the front seat was out. But the lighter did still function. Good, since he had just started smoking, unfiltered Camels, so recently that each cigarette still nauseated him.
That was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The long weekend still giving the streets a half empty holiday feel. Crews had just finished hanging Christmas lights to brighten Wichita’s uninteresting places.
This boy was going to what he considered another uninteresting place, Haysville, a whole working class small town of humble homes and trailer parks about 10 miles from Wichita, due south. Haysville was the other end of the world from the Garveys and the black ghetto.
As you entered a billboard declared it the Peach Capital of Kansas, and yes it was surrounded by the orchards of small poor truck farms. No 100,000 acres of wheat there. Haysville looked even less appetizing in daylight. Darkness favored it, gave its ugliness obscurity.
Haysville was itself a place of bad reputation. It too was a ghetto–for the working class.
The boy’s oldest brother, Steve, lived there in a dirty and dilapidated duplex—living room like a closet, one bedroom, one infinitesimal toilet which so repelled the boy never used it. Steve said he thought it the remnant of a motel, from the 1940s. His landlord and lady lived in the other half of the duplex. Delmar and Peggy Brown.
They were always deliriously happy alcoholics, late 40s. Their front yard held two whole Harley’s, his and hers, plus a spread of bike parts in the weeds giving the impression that they’d blown up a third one. They might have.
Steve had invited his little brother down for a party at Delmar’s and Peggy’s, and later for him to meet Steve’s new girl friend and go to a dance at the Haysville VFW.
Steve called this woman the dragon lady. He was ever doing, saying exotic things. The boy was forever copying him.
Peggy had made a big Pumpkin pie. Delmar’s new patch of home made beer filled their bathtub, ice down. Peggy and Delmar were already drunk when he arrived. Steve was about so. The boy took a beer from Delmar and a piece of pie from Peggy.
Delmar kept repeating the same thing, “Pegger, I tole you once, I tole you twice you crazy enough without getting’ drink on yer ass.” This was a broken record until in fury Peggy yelped “Delmy, stop that shit” and hit him straight in the eye with a piece of pumpkin pie. Their pie fight was serious.
They’d claw a finger through the pumpkin and fling the goo. Much of the pie was splattered on them and their living room walls.
Delmar made weird beer. It’s taste was so yeasty the Boy thought it was like drinking homemade sour dough bread. But it grew on him. Sixteen that the kid was.
Both Delmar and Peggy worked at Cessna. Both their 20-something year-old sons worked at Cessna. They were a family of plane builders, and it was all they’d known since leaving Arkansas during World War II. They earned decent money but chose like the rest of Haysville to live in a comfortable squalor. None of them had ever flown.
In ramshackle Haysville virtually the entire population built planes. All of Wichita’s airplane factories—Boeing, Beechcraft, Cessna, and Learjet were located in the city’s southeast quarter, only a few-minutes commute away. In its glory days the Wichita Boeing factory alone employed more than 40,000 and during WWII had built the B29 Super fortress. Delmar and Peggy had moved to the Wichita area to build the B29s. Only layoffs at Boeing had brought them to Cessna. They spoke of Boeing like a lost family.
Haysville was a comfy settlement for these workers and its fortunes went with the air industry, up and down. That wintry Friday the town was down and about out. All the plants were laying off. The boy understood the plight of New England mill towns, he lived in a prairie version.
Wichita and Haysville suited the okies and arkies just fine. Less than 60 miles from the Oklahoma state line the area had kept some of the Cherokee Strip, Indian Territory.
Wichita itself, 200,000 people, was a Jackson Pollock spatter painting, a sprawl of quickly built and mismatched buildings. But despite the city’s gleeful partying a bitter smoke hung in the air from strong memories of Dust bowl loss and Great Depression misery.
The party had turned into an uproar of fighting between Delmar and Peggy, with Steve playing his guitar and singing Woody Guthrie, also outlaw ballads about Jesse James and Belle Starr, trying to be heard above Peggy’s beloved Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.
“Trailer for sale or rent. Rooms to let, fifty cents. No phone, no pool, no pets. I ain’t got no cigarettes.”
“Stop it right now, Peg, I wanna hear Belle Star. Sing it again, Steve.”
“Belle Starr, Belle Starr, tell me where you have gone since old Oklahoma’s sand hills you did roam?”
Back and forth it went. Delmar kept yelling “you bitch!,” words flung furiously at Peggy along with more of the pumpkin pie. Ignoring him, soon as her song ran through she’d lift the needle and play it again. Throughout the boy sat on the couch drinking yeast and grinning in delight.
The party was going in bacchanalian good humor when someone knocked on the front door. Then all was changed.
Georgia walked in. Steve’s dragon lady.
She entered limping, an open thigh-length fur coat, black pant suit and for the boy the disheveled room tilted. This one legged woman came in and her crutch turned into an elegant accessory. Her blonde hair was pulled back tight from her face showing a cat’s forehead, a face of perfect features. She carried the assuredness of effortless superiority that beautiful women have yet without a hint of the haughty grandeur some beauties show. For the boy she would remain the loveliest woman of his life.
Steve had warned him not to gawk at the leg, So he paid it no mind. He didn’t even see it for real and wouldn’t notice it again. The rest of Georgia was all the reality he could handle. Steve said to him, “She used to model before she lost the leg.” The boy could see that was the truth.
Even Delmar and Peggy stopped clowning to grin up at her, like peasants in adoration of the Madonna. They were on all fours because until just then they’d been chasing each other and grunting. “Hey there, baby doll,” they burbled with obvious fondness.
Georgia walked straight over to the boy, to him watching her so closely it seemed she calculated every move, every word from a long experience. And what she said came in a friendly croon, a contralto voice of no particular accent that meant what it said. No ‘ain’t’s. Neither a ‘yeah’ nor a ‘ya’. Never a ‘gonna.’
How this woman came out of Coffeyville, Kansas mystified the boy. Except that it had been an outlaw border town, and he could sense something lawless about her. Something reminiscent of the Daltons in her blue eyes.
He would never know much about her, other than what his brother told. One item he remembered, she’d been married five times. Georgia herself never gave a hint of her past.
“I heard you were smart and good looking. I see that at least you’re smart.” She laughed like a close friend. “Is that your cherry bye-bye out front?” The boy didn’t understand her meaning but he nodded. “Well, be careful with that. I think it’s going to break a few hearts.”
At last they left for the Haysville VFW. All tipsy. Georgia had been drinking vodka straight up in Peggy’s one clean glass. Delmar and Peggy were in one car. Steve and Georgia drove her new 1965 Convertible Mustang. The boy went following in his Firedome, heater on high (it at least worked).
The boy went on his own because his father, the Reverend, had a midnight curfew for him, which in a couple of months he’d already be contemptuously ignoring.
Haysville’s VFW was a cinder block bunker, one story with nothing to mark it except the unlit VFW lodge sign. A row of windows along the front were peeks inside, into a dim jumble of low watt lights and a crowd of bodies in a naughty no-tell and slightly festive interior.
The building tonight was surrounded by a hundred truack and cars, all American made. The lot was dirt. It was packed tight. The boy could only park at the farthest end.
This Veteran of Foreign Wars lodge like most was dedicated to a local fallen warrior in some action great or small who only a few living now remembered. It was built for large patriotic meetings but used almost exclusively as a bar where the first vets of Vietnam (their boyish battle cries still faltering on), forgotten Korea, heroic World Wars I and II, even a quickly dying out from the Spanish American War.
All would get shit faced once a week, or nightly depending, in the gloom and maybe find some gal willing to fuck. No one said it, thought it, but this was morphine for the horror they’d seen.
It was that year’s Christmas season kick off party. Tinsel fell in globs from the ceiling. The windows were framed in blinking red lights. Every male except the boy and Steve had on either a cowboy hat or a Boeing golf cap, all in polyester slacks, all wearing cowboy boots. Georgia caught the eye of every man in the place.
There was a small band in a corner playing tired favorites. The room sweated, packed tight with dancing couples. The bartenders couldn’t keep up with orders. After a while the band refused to play requests for Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” a favorite because then everyone could have a good reason to cry.
Soon the boy realized that Steve and Georgia had disappeared. It hurt his feelings they’d left without a goodbye. He supposed it was because Georgia couldn’t dance and there was no vodka to be had. But then he found a girl so it was OK.
She was Juanita Butler. Sixteen she claimed and in the face and deportment that could be. But her body told on her, maybe she’d just turned 15, maybe. Juanita had long straight black Indian hair, brown skin and high cheekbones. The bones know. Later in a snuggling confidence she claimed half Mexican half Cherokee. She pointed out her dad on the dance floor, a big mean looking Indian who beamed benignly at Juanita.
She was small and slight. A surprisingly demure and handsome girl who said as little as possible. The boy liked her a lot.
No one knew why the fight began. It seemed a force of nature to the boy who had never seen one before. Tables toppled. Chairs were broken. The music stopped when the band joined in. The boy could see Delmar and Peggy shielding behind the nearest table top, both draped in tinsel. To be heard over the fight Peggy screeched, “Delmy, If I told you once I told you twice yer crazy ‘nough without getting’ drunk.”
Juanita listened thoughtfully to the boy’s whisper. Hand in hand they skirted the brawl and ran out the front door. The boy took her on the run to his DeSoto. It stood at the farthest back of the parking lot, no lights there. They were safely away from the fist-a-cuffing vets inside the VFW.
She didn’t seem impressed by the car. He turned it on so she could hear the wondrous engine and to get the heat full going. The girl trembled against his body. He warmed her up to the motions of the Hemi Head pistons. The boy got a hard on.
“The radio doesn’t work,” she complained.
“The lighter does,” replied the boy. They were already well perfume with Camel smoke. He pulled her face close for a kiss. And that’s what they did from then on. They kissed, kissed, tongued and kissed.
Nonstop they went at it until in a dizzy rampage in an uproar of frosted dust the Haysville police force arrived.
All five in the forces fleet charged into the parking lot. With sirens on they came swerving dramatically into the parking lot, their red lights twirling. Baby blue Dodges. They skidded to a halt in a half circle formation in front of the VFW.
The cops jumped out with guns drawn and went rushing in. Then after a couple of minutes they came rushing back outside again to hunker down behind their open doors.
That did it. A blitzkrieg of ammo flew out from inside the building, shattering the windows of the VFW. Bullets pounded into the parking lot, gouging small trenches into the earth, hitting cars, trucks. Many shots just disappeared forever up into the night sky. Someone inside ripped down the red lights around the windows.
The chief, Juanita called him, had a bullhorn in hand plastered to his lips like a Jericho trumpet.
“OK in there, you Veterans of Foreign Wars, fights over. All of you come out with your hands up.”
Someone inside yelled “Come and get us you dirty coppers,” to a roar of laughter. Strangely when the police began to fire back their bullets all went into the cinder blocks.
“This Chief ain’t gonna hurt anyone. He’d lose his job.” Explained the girl, running a cold hand of delicate fingers between the buttons of the boy’s shirt.
Thinking it unfair that his chest hair hadn’t yet started growing, he said in wonder at what he was seeing, “The veterans are firing like crazy.”
“Of course they are,” she said, “They’re all too plastered to hit anything.” Her hand moved ever so sweetly to his upper thigh.
Just in time a pickup pulled up to the DeSoto and Juanita’s dad waved for her. “Watch out for stray bullets kid,” he called out to the boy, “It might have your name on it.”
She hopped dutifully over to the truck just as the first vets began straggling out of the Haysville VFW. The battle was over. The boy felt cheated.
Juanita had left behind her telephone number on a scrap of paper. Alone in the dark the boy quickly took care of his hard on.
A crowd of Veterans began stumbling out to stood shivering in the parking lot, corralled by the Haysville police force. Men and women were too miserable to do any milling or complaining. It’s like Hogan’s Heroes, thought the boy. He felt the urge to laugh at the scene. For some reason he didn’t. He saw it as a fizzled rebellion.
In a panic the boy noticed he’d missed his curfew. The Rev would be pissed, important because he had a bad temper and more importantly was the fount of gas money.
Pulling away from the VFW he heard a few more forlorn shots in the dark. Most of the vets were too drunk to even keep their arms up in surrender, especially those with a Grain Belt beer can in hand. Some had simply sunk down to sit on the frozen prairie earth. He wondered what the police would do with them, guessing let them go just before the older ones began succumbing to thermal shock.
Delmar hunched on the edge of the crowd. He tilted. No more now than another hung over plane-factory worker. He stood turned away from the crowd. That way the boy saw the shape of a Saturday night special tucked into the back of his jeans. In the night many things had happened. Most of all Georgia had come into his life. He’d even heard Woody Guthrie for the first time, Steve and his guitar had sung it for him. Momentous events went round and round in his sour dough beer brain.
Last the boy saw of Peggy that night, for sure he’d see her again, she came wobbling out of the VFW blinded by the police lights. The boy imagined clots of pie still stuck in her hair.
That was too bad. Peggy made the greatest down-home, Arkansas pumpkin pie anywhere. And that was a cold hearted fact.
She had her hands in the air. They were flipping the cops with double birds. Peggy wore a strand of tinsel around her neck. She was yelling too, loud and clear.
It was a good performance. She jerked in fits of fury, keeling over then bolting up straight in her passion with her head back howling.
“You assholes! Don’t shoot me, God damn you. We served this country! This joint’s holy ground. We were jes havin’ some Christmas cheer!”
And the frozen wind kept coming at them. Down relentlessly from the Rockies. It came across 450 miles of emptiness, no mountain in the way.
You paint a great picture Jonathan! Captures the wildeness and humor of that night and our beginning adventures with the ladies. Really enjoyed it!