You did not think about amazements such as opening a drawer and therein were laundered shirts or how the garage had a car for you. In a cotton buttoned down I drove the scarlet Grand Prix to Joe’s house on a golf course near the country club and met Joe in his driveway.
          We are sixteen, he goes, “You wanna take your car or the Buick?”
          Just to a three aisle grocery, one mile, we take his dad’s gunmetal Buick Wildcat that does 130 and rips around and we even have a friend who drives a Mercedes 300SL casually.
          Joe in his Bermudas without a thought for the horsepower, leather smell, the green forest light, talks fiercely about Bellow and Updike until we pass the country club with poolside vacation girls and on a jade towel Sherry Angel: beehive blonde, Cleopatra eyes, fifteen.
          “Apparently she can already mix perfect cocktails,” Joe tells me
          And dates men who own companies with private planes. There were lower barriers protecting girls then and smoking for a quarter a pack anywhere you wanted, please, go ahead, I don’t mind, match?
          And coffee, they just gave it to you, you sit down, “Here’s your coffee. Have you decided yet? Let me freshen that up for you. Here’s a clean ashtray.”
          1964, somebody charge a dollar for coffee it would be, I don’t know what.
          I add here how we were both virgins, and Joe painstakingly studied fiction books and I didn’t. I wore the white Levi’s and I mean I was in Indiana and had freckles. The sun shot through leaves in patchy light and college was due in Fall.
          Joe: “The reason I called, remember that guy graduated last year? Went to Harvard?”
          “Tucker something? I don’t remember him but he was a nice guy.”

1

 

Copyright 2008 Disclaimer