Girls Girls Girls
Part One: I Dated The FBI
That date we’d decided to go to a drive-in movie. I wanted to play hide the pickle. I tried to. Just got it hidden and she burst into tears. My parents wanted me to be a Victorian gentleman, which didn’t take well on my libertine persona—how I saw myself then. Yet enough did to make me wilt in her distress. Any damsel.
Instead both of us sat in the back seat of my old Desoto oblivious to the screen in that Dallas drive-in theater. Her crimson lips were leaving me be-crimsoned while she played another game called West Texas Oil Well Derrick on my lap.
We missed most of the feature. In the swarmy aftermath we sat stunned while a pitch for the concession stand showed dancing popcorn.
Perhaps what happened next was induced in her by the security of my presence, or of the sheltering dark, or the almost empty drive in, or of the comforting hulk of my old Desoto’s steel shell armoring us, carapace strong and sure, or perhaps just because she had quieted me down, turned me into a mere boy.
Cathy McKinnon, the name I knew her by, gave me a kiss that seemed disconcertingly motherly, also a tad trenchant, and reached around to double check that the doors were locked.
“OK for you Jonathan Bell! You must promise me on a stack of Bibles that what I tell you stays secret. You swear to me? This is serious. Swear it, Jonathan Bell!” I did in complete bewilderment.
“That man over there?” She gave a wave in the direction of a stray car parked a couple of speakers away.
“That man is my FBI agent. You see I’m in witness protection.”
That wave went to a nondescript Ford occupied by a single man who in the gloom seemed the definition of nondescript, although vaguely moving, a bit mysteriously. A man masturbating into a popcorn cup? Outline showed him wearing what then came to seem a standard-issue G-man trilby hat.
I could have blurted ‘oh yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.’ I didn’t. What she’d said fitted the strangeness about her. Fitted the stranger too sitting alone there in his car with a face lit up chiaroscuro by the screen.
From then on when together I’d look. The same spook would be along with us, the Mr. Nobody from that nocturne of thrills, becoming singular for his ambiguity and memorable for it.
In memory I’d describe Cathy as Doris Day touched by the dark force. Chronically cheery in a fragile way, a soap bubble you knew could burst at any second.
She wore more makeup than any young woman I’d seen, maybe have yet to see. In my poetic youth I thought of it as a mask worn to protect herself from black magic. Or one to hide behind from unkind eyes, or maybe just from her own?
Her eccentricity showed in that face. Cathy encrusted herself with layers of pancake makeup to get a Commedia dell’Arte aspect. Along with that she drew on a pair of thick crimson lips. Then she added a drool of black eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara so that her eyes and lashes loomed huge and reminded me of Gloria Swanson’s as she descends the stairs into madness at the end of Sunset Boulevard.
She first came into my view sipping on a Dr. Pepper through a straw from the bottle the way southern people drank it then. This happened there in Dallas, in the student union of Southern Methodist University, in January of 1968. I was 18 and a Freshman from Wichita.
For some reason, perhaps because of where I met her, my first daft impression was that she too was a student and a freshman. I think of myself then as a lad old for my years. From the start I got her wrong, hare-brained notions that persisted. Now I figure that she was actually about 10 years my senior.
To me she was Cathy McKinnon at least she gave that as her name. Unlikely, I would come to realize in my slow way. Nothing was for certain about her. I was about as callow as Kansas can make ‘em.
The one thing about her I’ve never doubted, her claim to be from Jackson, Mississippi. Her accent gave that away along with her eye lash batting southern belle mannerisms, a true magnolia under a face like a novice whore’s.
With blue eyes, blond hair, an arresting body that caught the look of most men, it was only her face that struck discord, jarringly. But never mind, because at 18 I was already drawn to the eccentric, and to a body like hers.
Beside sex, what drew me to that person Cathy McKinnon? In particular I came to admire her sometimes hilarious commentary on the state of things about us, the people we saw in passing. Drole, acerbic, hers was an unusual intelligence. A spirit somewhat kindred to mine.
Cathy, she told me, had been a stewardess for Braniff Air. Easy enough to see her bouncing through a terminal in a Holston uniform. Once I knew this it suited her perfectly, her Doris Day demeanor great for while the plane goes down.
This post revelation gave her considerable allure. Witness protection, the FBI, Untouchables. Certainly she was more mature than me. A maturity perhaps honed by so many hours spent soaring precariously above the clouds. Also I admired how she gave such accomplished head.
Cathy said that back in Jackson her father owned a real estate agency. That her mother was a school teacher. Maybe so, all to be left in mystery and deception. I did picture her family sipping mint juleps on their expansive, very white porch in leisured gentility.
Meanwhile, as ice melted in the drinks of bemused Mississippi middle class whites, racial terrorism raged on the other side of their fences. The mini race war was fraught with cross-burnings and church-bombings, beatings and murder.
In the summer of 1964 alone Klansmen had killed six in the State, shot 35 others and beaten another 80. The homes, businesses and churches of 68 Mississippians associated with the civil rights movement were firebombed.
In the immediate Jackson area in the period just before I met Cathy, during 1966-67, a further 27 black congregations had their churches fire bombed. Four civil rights activists were murdered there by the Klan.
Arson, bombings, gunfire. Fear was thicker than the humidity. Even when I was seeing Cathy the violence in Mississippi continued with the murder in February ’68 of Wharlest Jackson in a car bombing while driving home from work. The fifth murder in less than three years, tallying at least the 11th in four years by the State’s radical white supremacists.
Good enough reasons to hide Cathy who’d seen the dreaded White Knights do what they oughtn’t. And Southern Methodist was a good enough hiding place for her. A school then of a few thousand students, elite for the South and very expensive. By nature it was blandly conservative and politely racist.
It’s campus was a mirage island of Tidewater architecture on the edge of downtown Dallas, unimaginatively harmonious, all in red brick and with loads of white columns. A lot of oil money built it to resemble a stupendous back lot for a movie about a plantation in the old South.
Come every spring and the entire university was turned over to ‘Old South Week’. This when frat boys dressed in the full regalia of Confederate officers rode their horses about giving the rebel yell.
Sorority girls put on lavish gowns. Their Scarlet O’Hara hats flopped above sets of pearly whites more than a few still in glinting braces. I saw them wave their little white-gloved hands, watched astonished when they were driven in dozens of carriages up and down Bishop Boulevard, listened to lascivious tales of how they sported after dark.
The year I was there I never saw a black student, although there were plenty of other black folks.
At SMU the dorm rooms were the stuff of dreams of other universities. Rooms that were made up, cleaned every day by black maids. Gangs of maids and janitors, theirs the only black faces to encounter. Although they were never seen on or near the works of their hands– landscaped paths, spotless campus streets, stately quads. Apparent to me, they came and went invisible.
I wondered what they thought of dear ole South week.
Many freshman I learned were dropped onto SMU, kids who hadn’t done so well in their private schools, whose chronically absentee parents lived without their bother somewhere over the rainbow. On my dorm floor all the boys had new cars, some costing a deal more than my father made in a year. A couple had airplanes.
My fellow freshmen thought my Desoto was part of a costume that went with my long hair and beard. It was whimsy. Their reality flipped the coin of my own, first dorm floor party was held in an Architectural-Digest mansion, a wonder to me, with an ornamental creek running through the middle of the first floor.
All freshman were to live on campus, the only exception being Helen Hunt, not the actress, the youngest child of oilman H.L. Hunt then among the wealthiest men in the world. Helen was brought to school in a Bentley driven by her chauffeur.
SMU was also used by the elite of Central America to hide their young. There were three of these on my floor. A sad Jewish boy from Panama, a rambunctious youngster from Honduras who could barely speak a word of English, and the scion of the owner of the largest newspaper in Costa Rica. They were buddies of mine we all being misfits.
I saw the school as a decadent pageant, the playground for rich indolent youths, without any redeeming quality other than that it made me move on. For my sophomore year I transferred out to join fellow rebellious spirits of the time, at the University of Kansas, a prairie U that had produced as many Rhodes Scholars as Harvard.
At Southern Methodist my own mark of Cain was my long hair and beard. I stood out starkly. I was also among the few Yankees. Early in that academic year I had a peek at what life could be for young men in Dallas, either Mexican or black.
One night about midnight coming back to campus from a party a cruiser pulled me over with its light flashing. I’d been warned to be careful of this and knew I’d done nothing to deserve the stop.
He was a big cop, tall and heavy set. I made the mistake of getting out of the car. After pondering my Kansas drivers license in mute stupefaction he told me to get lost. I replied amicably “OK.”
Suddenly he grabbed me by the shirt, spun me around, picked me up by the back of my pants and threw my over the hood of the Desoto, legs spread, face pressed down hard to the metal.
“Yankee boy, don’t know about where you come from but down here we say ‘yes sir, no sir’ to our police.”
Home for a weekend with her parents in Jackson Cathy had been drawn to a living room window at about 11 pm. Attracted there by something vaguely indiscrete happening outside. She told me she witnessed men running across the lawn of the house across the street.
From her description it was the kind of narrow lane the well-to-do live on. What she saw on the neighbor’s lawn showed up close lit by a street lamp and a full moon.
One of the men, it seemed, watched the street. When he waved the other man threw something. An explosion followed and the front of her neighbor’s house spilled out onto their lawn. It was an explosion powerful enough to knock a large house off its foundation.
The running pair came back to their car. Then Cathy saw their white faces clearly, under the streetlight, evil in the full moon moonlight.
The neighbor across the street was Rabbi Dr. Perry Nussbaum of the Beth Israel Temple, Jackson’s only Jewish congregation. By luck the rabbi and his wife escaped serious injury. The home was ruined.
Most ardent and feared of all the Klan, the White Knights were credited with the bombings in Jackson related to the Beth Israel Temple– that of the Temple itself in September, 1967 and then of the Rabbi’s home in November.
The attacks caused a national outcry. One can bomb dozens of churches of poor blacks, kill them too, but if you attack moneyed whites you’re in deep doo-doo. In white America when the Indians attack the circle of wagons suddenly lets in Jews. As long as they look like Lauren Bacall or Paul Newman.
This to explain why Cathy became a ward of the FBI, swifted away 400 miles from Jackson to Dallas. The Bureau set her up to be ostensibly ‘attending’ SMU and living like any freshman coed. She’d been placed in Boaz hall one of the university’s women’s dorms. Dallas’ Love Field being her Braniff hub they were cleverly hiding her in plain sight.
When I came back to Dallas after Spring break, following Martin Luther King’s assassination in April, I found the city surreal in its calm, indifferent to a crime that left much of the country on the verge of insurrection.
I walked over to Cathy’s dorm and asked for her at the desk just as I’d done over the past three months. After an awkward pause I learned she’d withdrawn from school.
Simply that and no more. Disappeared. And leaving no jet trail behind her. Not even a whisper or sigh even to this day.
I was left with the lyrics that Elvis sang, “return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.”
