Camelot

(my photograph of a painting by Balthus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The world never loved safe havens, I guess. I should have paid more attention to the King Arthur legend.

Everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot. I was on the playground at school. They called us all in to watch the news on TV. That night my family did something unusual for us--we went out to eat. Nothing fancy, of course, just a Morrison's Cafeteria, but I remember the hushed tones in that room more than anything else about the day. Even my parents seemed awkward.

And perhaps from that moment on, the awkwardness stayed with us always. The war in Vietnam played on TV every night as we ate our dinners. Soon, my mother (who I realize only now was in her early thirties) began wearing new styles. I didn't like it. I even resented it. I didn't want a mother who was hip. And she wasn't, really. We began to quarrel about the length of my hair. And maybe about everything else, too.

By the time I was fifteen, there was serious trouble in our house, and I didn't like coming home. I began hanging out at the homes of other kids. Homes, I call them, though they were already broken. But at least the arguments there were entertaining ins a macabre way. The troubles weren't mine. Home seemed a place to get away from. It was where all troubles lay.

I began hanging around the shopping center, too. It was one of the new big ones, a line of stores fronted by a giant parking lot. It had a Woolworth's and a Thom McCann's Shoes, two women's stores, a Lerner's and something else, a Belk Lindsey department store, a record store, a Liggett's Drug Store that had a small restaurant that served breakfast, lunch and dinner. There was another five and dime whose name I can't remember, but it had a long lunch counter, too. There was a new Publix grocery store and a branch of the county library tucked into an alley next to our dentist's office which was next to a Laundromat that you accessed from the shopping center's back side. Tucked away in the alley was a big pool hall. That was a bad idea, I think, which I will get to. On the very far end of the structure was a Tom's Pizza, a place that sold its square pizzas by the piece. That was where the older kids hung out, and later, when I too was older, it was a place I worked.

There was also a news stand that had a pinball machine. The woman who ran the place was rough with the kids. She was unpredictable, really. Thinking back on it now, it probably had to do with who else was in the store. When it was empty, we were able to peruse the sexy magazine's that she sold. There were a bunch of them and they were located right next to the pinball machine where we drank slurpees and smoked cigarettes and poured our quarters into its hungry slot. If you hung out there, you would see your buddies. Everyone came. It was tough. It was dangerous. But if you were there alone and business was slow, the woman behind the counter would sell you cigarettes and even the sexy magazines. Maybe. It was hit or miss.

That was where I heard about a new phenomena. There was a girl, they said, who would get naked for anybody. Her parents went square dancing every Saturday night and left her alone in the house. Some of the older boys would go over and get drunk and she would take her clothes off. It wasn't Saturday night when I went over. It was the middle of the week. I went with the boy who told me about all this. He was her neighbor. Her parents were home, so he took me to the back of her house, to the window of her room, and he pulled himself up on the sill and looked in. "She's in there," he whispered, and he tapped on the glass. Right away, she pulled the curtain aside. We were standing in the darkness bathed by the dim golden glow projected by the bare light bulb inside.

I couldn't believe what happened next. He told her he wanted to see her, but she said no, her parents were home. He whispered another incantation through the dirty screen and suddenly she was unhooking its retainers and pulling it aside. Then she got a chair and brought it to the window where she climbed up so we could get a better view. And then, standing there in that dim golden light shadowed now only by her, she gave me my first vision of womanhood. Girlhood, I guess, but you couldn't believe the thing when she pulled her nightgown up to her shoulders revealing herself in the naked light. My friend reached up and touched her, but only for a second. We were all nervous that her parents would come and so the whole encounter from the first tap on the window pane to the last act of replacing the dirty screen took no more than a couple minutes. It didn't matter, though. I'd been scarred.

The next day at school, I couldn't wait to tell my friends what I had seen. I was stupid, I guess, but I said it in a crowd where some girls were able to hear. That afternoon, the principal came and called me out of class. I liked him, generally, but I knew something bad was happening. I tried to talk to him as we walked, my heart racing like a speedboat, but he wouldn't say a word. When we got to his office, he told me to sit down and he closed the door. What could this be? I wondered. It was bad news for sure. Had there been an accident? Had somebody died? He sat down at his desk across from me and waited for a long moment before he asked me, "What did you do last night?" I wasn't prepared for that in any way and suddenly I was falling down, down, down, head over heals, spinning, twirling. I couldn't feel my tongue when I said, "Nothing." Then he asked me if I knew. . . and he said the name of the girl. And I don't know what happened next, but soon I was blurting out everything feeling myself a victim. Everybody was talking about it, I said, and so and so asked me to go over and I didn't know what we were doing and then she climbed up on the chair and I didn't even touch her or anything. . . . . I was righteous, a victim of unusual circumstances, unwitting and truly unwilling. And I could tell, even in my naiveté, that he had not expected to hear all this. After a while, he simply told me to go back to class.

For the next couple of days, boys were called into his office and questioned. And the whole sordid tale came out--everything. I was long forgotten by then. I was no more than the crack in the dam. But after each interview, every boy would come out and tell what he told and the next boy would be called in, and finally the girl's parents were there. By now, the whole school knew about what had been going on, and so did some of the other parents. I had been lucky to be the first called in, I think, and my parents never knew. In the end six boys were suspended for a week.

After that, no one would talk to the girl. But the oddest thing began to happen. She seemed to bloom right before our eyes. Every week, something changed, her clothing, her hair, and she grew by increments more and more attractive. Even the thing that had happened, I believe, was transformed gaining some supernatural illumination.  She seemed a sullied redneck Icon.  Her very presence seemed to glow.

Or maybe that was all just me and the way I learned to look at it then, but I must admit I developed a secret fondness for her that I could never confess.