Chinaberry Sidewalks (14 page)

LaQuita Freeman and the Kotex Kid

O
n a crisp November morning, the year Hurricane Carla reconfigured most of the southeast Texas coastline, I rode my bicycle to school, dreaming of what it would feel like to kiss LaQuita Freeman on the mouth. With the air bristling cool for the first time in six months, the world seemed freshly awakened from a long night’s sleep. Mother Nature’s lifting the lid on oppressive humidity came with a boost of optimism missing since Grandma Katie had died the previous April. A hint of autumn gave Norvic Street the feel of having made a turn for the better. Mental acuity was sharp, spirits were high, and flights of fancy, particularly those of falling in love, were making a comeback around the neighborhood.

LaQuita Freeman was out of my league and I knew it, not because she was rich—her father’s absence left her mother as short of cash as a construction worker during the rainy season—but because she was beautiful and I was a moron. The sight of LaQuita strolling self-possessed down the hallway, sixth-grade notebook cradled in the crook of her arm, impervious to the hormonal hubbub stirred by her presence, made spellbound dunces of every would-be Prince Charming within spit-wad distance, yours truly most noticeably. Anglo-Spanish bloodlines rendered LaQuita Freeman the most compelling creature the Jacinto City Elementary School’s student body had ever gawked at. The chances of my exchanging intimacies with such stunning beauty—being all frog and no prince—stood less than one in a hundred zillion.

The cool weather made the six-block ride to school on my bicycle a heightened-awareness meditation. Bike riding suited the natural fluidity of my eleven-year-old coordination, and few rode with more flair. I made it my habit to ride on the left side of the street, facing the oncoming traffic, more to maximize my ability to dodge what I saw coming than to minimize the odds of being run down from behind. Still, I couldn’t have predicted seeing LaQuita.

Alternating between riding with no hands and steering with the blue and white streamers spewing from my handlebar grips, I was singing J. Frank Wilson’s “Last Kiss” when Mrs. Freeman pulled up on the right in her lime-green Dodge Dart, catching me in the act of singing a stupid song and fantasizing about her daughter. The panic rising in my chest quickly subsided when something caught my eye. Sitting next to her mother, less than ten feet away from me, was the object of my obsession, pretty as a picture in a brand-new school dress.

Whether I can lay claim to what might be called a normal boyhood in the years leading up to 1961 is subject to debate. But in matters pertaining to LaQuita Freeman, apart from a brief stint spying on her from the tall weeds across the street from her house, I’d declare myself as normal as running water. Like any eleven-year-old boy, I’d sooner have danced naked in public than gaze into the dark olive eyes of Aphrodite’s younger sister. Yet that’s what I did. And to my surprise, a faint smile, slightly less noncommittal than the Mona Lisa’s, appeared on the very lips I’d have drunk a gallon of Black Flag roach killer for the pleasure of a passing peck on.

Emboldened by this hint of promise, I began racing toward a future that included holding LaQuita’s hand during the Saturday matinee at the Capitan Theater. Preening and pedaling, I kept my profile alongside their car. I was practically riding to school with the love of my life. “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)” rocketed to number one on my internal hit parade. My Schwinn Jaguar roared like a ’56 Chevy with glasspack mufflers. Considering the lack of influence that gravity had on the moment, I might as well have been hurling myself through space.

The cars belonging to teachers and other employees were always parked at an angle in front of the school building, front bumpers to the curb, and approaching school from the left-hand side of the street required me to skirt their rear bumpers. There was little room for error. Until that morning, I had little need of it.

Mr. Weiss, my sixth-grade teacher, owned a late-model Plymouth with vertical tail fins. There were two things about Mr. Weiss that everybody knew. One, he was the only Jew in Jacinto City. Two, he parked his supersized hot rod in the same slanted slot every morning, so normally I navigated around its protrusions with my built-in radar.

In the process of staging one last sidelong glance to lay the foundation for a later pledge of undying love, I decided on the move where I stand up on the pedals and steer with no hands. Bad idea. A second later I rammed the left-rear quarter panel of Mr. Weiss’s white Batmobile. The impact sent me headfirst onto the pavement, where I left half the skin on the right side of my face on the pea-gravel blacktop.

LaQuita’s mother was the first to reach me. She simply opened her door to where I lay listening to the sounds of a typical November morning. Not until a vision of LaQuita appeared above me like the Mexican ghost of Florence Nightingale did I feel the humiliating pain of crashing into Mr. Weiss’s car.

The awkwardness of exchanging intimacies with my beloved under such unflattering circumstances was more than I could bear: I had no choice but to die in the vicinity of her open arms. So complete was my surrender, I think I actually drifted off into a dream in which I rode LaQuita home on the pump seat of my bicycle, its handlebar tassels a flying testament to my overall good fortune.

When I found myself back in the world, Mr. Vick, the head custodian, was directing curious onlookers to “stand back and give the boy some room.” Before my defense system could realign itself, I spilled the beans to everyone in earshot. “I was ridin’ along lookin’ at LaQuita when I hit something.”

The worst thing that could’ve happened just had. Debbie Twilley, the biggest blabbermouth in our class, heard my pitiful confession and sped off to spread the news that I’d totaled my bike, showing off for LaQuita.

Humiliation prolonged itself in every possible direction. My face flatly refused to heal. The dent in Mr. Weiss’s fender was practically granted status as a historical landmark. And with me back on foot, taunts hurled by passing bicyclists—“Hey, lover boy, need a ride?”—were taken in grim stride as I turned inward, a marked man and a lovesick fool.

I can’t remember how or when I was assigned the job of Kotex courier, the trauma of my first few solo purchases perhaps blocking the recall. Most likely it was the summer of 1960, a year and a half before the first flickers of sexual self-consciousness announced that something was fundamentally wrong about my mother’s sending me out to buy her Kotex. As a boy of ten, I should’ve been spared the knowledge of packaging subtleties that differentiated one box of Kotex from another. No matter how violently or whimperingly I made my protest known, she refused to relinquish the ritual. Without fail, the arrival of her monthly curse brought me face-to-face with the dilemma of being seen holding a giant box of Kotex Supers in the checkout line.

“Honey,” she’d say, “I need you to run down to the store and get me a box of Supers.”

“Aw, Momma, don’t make me go get you no Kotex. Somebody might see me.”

“You ain’t but eleven years old. Nobody’s payin’ attention to what you’re buyin’.”

“They do, too. I ain’t goin’.”

“If I get your daddy’s belt, I reckon you’ll go all right.”

“You can use three belts, I still ain’t goin’.”

“One … two … three … four … five … six … seven …”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Keep talking like that, and I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Now go on and git.”

Blindfold and spin me in tight circles until I’m drunk as my favorite uncle, and I’ll still know on which aisle the feminine napkins are to be found. Before taking the plunge into the sex-soaked world of Kotex possession, I make it my business to carefully gauge the activity on every other aisle in the grocery store. Knowing the whereabouts of potential unwanted encounters is crucial to a successful Kotex run.

By the Top Kick dog food—“three cans for a quarter”—I’ll see Dennis Reed rounding the far corner, and he’s not buying Kotex. I’ll pretend to be considering the Austex Chili and the Miracle Whip and ketchup. When I’m satisfied the aisle is clear, to justify my aimless lingering I’ll say aloud, should anybody be able to hear me, “In case Momma wants to send me back after a while, I better go make sure they got plenty of Dr Pepper.”

On the canned-juice and soda-water aisle, an elderly lady I don’t recognize is comparing the price of Del Monte prune juice to a lesser-known but equally effective brand while Orville, the middle-aged stock boy, unloads Coke twelve-packs from their wooden shipping crates. “Hey, Orville,” I’ll say, and continue making my sweep.

A box of Kotex Supers won’t fit under my arm, behind my back, or down my pants. Hiding it beneath my winter coat works only up to a point: The moment of truth is at the checkout counter.

I know that misreading the ebb and flow of checkout traffic puts me at risk of getting trapped behind a housewife with a two-month supply of groceries some absentminded clerk is making a career of idly ringing up. Having already identified the slowpoke checkers, I’ll keep my feet moving and an eye out for impending encounters. Experience will have taught me that to stand still is to invite discovery. Still, the simple fact remains that no matter how well I’ve laid the groundwork, a clean getaway comes down to pure luck.

The dreaded blue boxes of Kotex Supers are on the aisle with the Mr. Clean, squeeze mops, and aluminum foil. Once I’ve grabbed a box, I’ll make a beeline for the checkout lane and avoid eye contact, especially with the clerk. The last thing I need is a dawdling conversation at the cash register. With luck, the box will make it into a sack even before I’m asked to pay. One kindhearted checker’s sensitive enough to bag the box of Kotex before ringing it up, the lone bright spot in the Minimax staff; the rest are bovine in nature and impervious to the struggles of an eleven-year-old boy trying to buy feminine napkins without getting humiliated. Not until the purchase is out of sight will I be free to let down my guard, stroll over to the candy counter, and plop down a penny for a single pack of Dubble Bubble or a Red Hot Jawbreaker.

One particular run ended in such total disaster that my career as a Kotex courier was put to an abrupt end. I’d survived the bicycle crash of the previous fall, my face unscarred and my love for LaQuita Freeman still smoldering. Baseball season lay just around the corner, and I was beginning to regain my equilibrium. Then came the monthly trip to the Minimax.

I’d carefully gauged the comings and goings of every cart and customer in the store before making what I thought was a well-informed move toward an empty checkout lane. But it was my misfortune to round a blind corner and smack right into Mrs. Freeman’s as-yet-empty shopping cart, where the box of Kotex landed like a turd in a punchbowl.

“My, but aren’t you accident prone,” Mrs. Freeman teased, her tone not at all friendly.

“It’s my mother’s,” I apologized.

“Obviously,” she sniffed, polite affectations no longer hiding a mean spirit. “You look like you’ve healed up pretty good,” she said, a small pleasantry that did nothing to conceal her opinion of me as pathetic.

With the very hands I’d long dreamed of holding, LaQuita reached into the cart and fetched the Kotex box back into mine—a gift I had no choice but to accept. She averted her eyes, sparing me further shame. It was a kindness that caused an intense hatred for my mother to crest from deep down inside. I swore to myself on Grandma Katie’s grave that I’d never ever buy Kotex again.

To be known as the dumb ass who crashed his bike into Mr. Weiss’s Plymouth while ogling LaQuita Freeman was something I had learned to live with. The Kotex collision was far more complex. Although I knew she wasn’t one to blab, I couldn’t help feeling that every pair of eyes in the sixth grade saw me as the Kotex Kid, and soiled innocence no longer allowed me the luxury of fantasizing about my dark-skinned Valentine. Daydreams turned to nightmares in which I pictured her handing me the box of Kotex over and over again. At the end of the school year, when Mrs. Freeman removed her daughter to some faraway and undisclosed location, I found relief outweighed the sorrow of her vanishing.

I was destined to chalk up more than my share of adolescent misfortune, but never was anything as painful as having my unworthiness handed to me that day in the Minimax.

Tripod Throws a Punch

B
y the age of thirteen, Delbert Matheny was taller than most grown men. His were the raw physical materials of an old-time NFL down lineman. “Big-boned skinny” is how Freckles Joyce, the seventh-grade PE teacher and assistant football coach, framed his physical attributes the first day of class. And it was Coach Joyce who unwittingly saddled him with the nickname that echoed with ridicule in the hallways of Galena Park Junior High School. The first time he saw Delbert come naked out of the boys’ shower, the affable coach howled loud enough to be heard in the girls’ locker room, “I be got-dang, son, that’s the longest tallywhacker I ever seen a boy drag through them doors. With a pecker like that, we might win some games around here. How ’bout it, Tripod, you coming out for football or not?” Recruiting Delbert Matheny to play football came to naught, but the Tripod moniker stuck.

If you show up for the first day of seventh grade standing six foot two, exuding befuddlement, with a schoolbook satchel in one hand and a Davy Crockett lunch box in the other, you might expect to be a marked young man. Factor in hand-me-down pants showcasing white shinbones and socks falling down around size-14 brogan clodhoppers, you just might expect the harsh light of adolescent exclusion to focus on you. Not Delbert. I doubt a more perplexed target of peer-group pressure existed in the fall of 1962. Short of becoming invisible, his chances of blending in were about as good as a Mongolian mud wrestler’s.

I liked Delbert. We shared a common bond near the bottom rung of the economic ladder and even the same bus stop. Conversation didn’t come naturally to him. In the four months we spent waiting for the morning bus, “I like the way you comb your hair” was his lone attempt at social banter. But he was an attentive listener, and we fell into an easy rapport. Each morning, I’d provide a rambling monologue on one of three topics—baseball cards, television shows, rock-and-roll songs—and he’d listen in rapt fascination. I was grateful for Delbert’s friendship. His nodding approval made the transition to junior high a little less daunting.

By the third day of seventh grade, I was aware that danger lurked in the back of the bus with four junior members of the Jake City Rebels, Jacinto City’s official greaser street gang. I knew instantly there was no chance a pack of ninth-grade wannabe Rebels itching to hone the craft of cool hatred could resist harassing smaller kids. Their backseat malevolence advertised itself with a smoldering luminescence.
Dangerous when bored
is how I saw it. Given that the bus ride to and from junior high school was only slightly less boring than
The Lawrence Welk Show
, I vowed to keep my distance. Anticipating where and how they’d strike became my number one priority.

High school compatriots wore black motorcycle jackets with “Jake City Rebels” stenciled in white across the back. The only prerequisites for membership were ducktails, a pompadour, and placing the musical merits of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran ahead of Elvis Presley’s. Horseshoe taps and concealed switchblades were optional.

Jacky Kilgore, the Rebels’ acknowledged leader, was my role model. The coolness with which he personified consummate danger while leading his gang of outsiders down nonbelligerent corridors of high-minded musicality inspired the notion that I, too, might someday ooze drop-dead cool and poetic sensitivity. During his brief reign—brief because Rebels were prone to scraping up cash for a mid-fifties hot rod and dropping out of school—knife fights reached an all-time low at Galena Park High School. Matters of manhood and whose girl somebody was got settled on the dance floor. It was common knowledge that during Jacky’s rule, the Jake City Rebels bopped themselves to near legitimacy.

Occasionally his father and mine drank whiskey and played guitars together. In the early fifties, Jack Kilgore Sr. had served three of a five-year sentence for assault and battery. “I’m proof the Texas state correctional system works,” I once heard him boast to my dad. “Ain’t a damn thing I got better to do than work on cars and play this guitar. Huntsville can kiss my filthy white ass. I ain’t ever goin’ back to that motherfucker.” Having the consummate Rebel’s old man as my father’s drinking buddy gave me a leg up in dealing with the dangerous minds of budding ninth-grade hoods stuck on a school bus with a bunch of seventh- and eighth-grade lame-os. I doubled my resolve to avoid drawing attention, figuring eye contact would come later in life.

It was a relief when they settled on Delbert as the focus of their hostility. The day Terry Holt, the junior ringleader, announced that come Friday he’d get off at our bus stop and “kick that sum-bitch Tripod’s ass for lookin’ at me wrong,” I relaxed for the first time in weeks. Delbert’s resignation was expressed with a clenched jaw and a blank stare.

When Friday arrived, Terry, his cronies, and a smattering of local riffraff got off when the bus pulled up in front of the vacant lot on the corner of Burman and Flint streets. Delbert, who could’ve crushed Terry with one hand, took the beating stoically. In my case, the instinct for survival took precedence over a guilty conscience. I watched from a distance, ashamed of my cowardice for not backing up my friend and at the same time relieved it wasn’t me who was getting creamed.

In the coming weeks the remaining Rebels took turns getting off the bus at our stop and giving Delbert a sound beating. Once I took a chance and asked the driver to stop them. “I get paid to drive” was his reply. I took his answer as proof I’d done my best. Meanwhile, Delbert took his punishment quietly.

As the Friday fights grew in popularity, an unsettling realization began to emerge. The fights wouldn’t end with the junior Rebels. Terry Holt would see to it that every boy within fifty pounds of Delbert’s weight class would challenge Tripod or suffer the consequences. There was no escaping the brutal truth that I, too, would fight Delbert or face Terry’s wrath.

Waiting for the bus became a silent affair. The seven a.m. cordiality Delbert and I shared vanished the day Terry set the Friday afternoon fights in motion. My friend’s sunny disposition became the grim countenance of a wounded animal. A future featuring weekly butt whippings left little room for the Delbert of old. I was too numb with fear to lament our loss.

My time to enter the ring came the Friday before Christmas. On Tuesday Terry had cornered me in the cafeteria. “Friday you’re fightin’ Tripod, you got that? You chicken out and I’m gonna kick your ass all the way to Beaumont.”

Having the inevitable spat in my face didn’t legitimize the code of conduct I adopted to deal with my friend’s ongoing predicament, but it did trigger the false notion that I had nothing to lose in a fistfight with Delbert. By my calculations, seven boys had gotten off the bus and he’d steadfastly refused to fight back. Given such pacifist tendencies, I thought it better to beat him up and apologize later than get beat up myself by Terry Holt.

When Friday came, Duke Fox and Larry Becker, junior Rebels, assumed the role of cornermen, and their prefight instruction on how to dismantle the gentle giant made me feel like the ultimate Judas. I saw myself for what I was: one more in a long line of Holt’s bare-fisted puppets, chin down, dukes up, bobbing and weaving like some punch-drunk lightweight back in the ring after a long layoff, an image I hated. The knots in my stomach were a sick testament to the absurdity of this warped rite of passage. I wanted to tell Terry to go fuck a duck. Instead, I made a serious tactical blunder.

If it wasn’t my intention to look Delbert in the eye, it certainly was my downfall. The recognition that his only friend had become his latest adversary awakened something long dormant in him with a start, and a drastic shift in his body language announced his desire to put an end to this spectacle once and for all. For what was likely the first time in his life, he clenched his mammoth fist and threw a punch, a clean body shot that landed square in the middle of my solar plexus. The impact rendered my lungs twin whoopee cushions. Worse than being dropped with one punch in front of a capacity crowd that included Beverly Drake, Betty Jo Branch, and Pam Munselle was the mortifying suspicion I’d farted in the process. Mostly so I could ask Duke Fox if I had indeed cut one, I struggled for an agonized eternity to coax air back into my lungs.

The crowd unraveled, stunned and disbelieving. Delbert gathered his book satchel and lunch box and strode away in princely fashion. One blow had toppled Terry Holt’s puppeteer empire like a house of cards.

Afterward, my mother’s idle inquiries about my health were brushed aside truthfully. “I got a stomachache,” I groaned, and pulled the bedroom door shut behind me.

That year, Christmas came with an ironic twist. A friend of my father’s whom I didn’t like gave me a pair of boxing gloves and a standing offer of free boxing lessons. It was another of Bill Broden’s many attempts to ingratiate himself as some kind of uncle figure in my life.

The previous July, my mother was in the hospital with severe vertigo. One afternoon, Bill showed up at the front door with two tickets to see Don Drysdale pitch against the Houston Colt .45s that same night. Normally I’d have given my Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays trading cards to see Drysdale pitch, but the thought of going to the game with Bill struck me as less appealing than sucking on a dead dog’s nose until its head caved in.

“Oh, sure he wants to go,” my father volunteered on my behalf.

“Aw, I don’t know,” I said, hoping he’d sense my reticence. “We got a game tomorrow, and I gotta wash my uniform and all that.”

“What’n the hell’re you talkin’ about?” he said. “It’s Drysdale going against Nottebart.”

“Then you can go in my place,” I said, sensing a prearranged situation.

“You’re goin’ to the damn game or I’ll wear your ass out,” my father said.

So I went.

During the forty-five-minute drive to Colt Stadium, Bill made a big show of fishing a paper sack from under the seat of his Pontiac for long
glugs
of whiskey. “If you was to tell your daddy I been hittin’ this mess takin’ you to the game, he’d whip the shit outta me,” he laughed, insinuating we were somehow partners in crime. “Reckon you’d blow the whistle on ole Bill if I was to give you a little sip?”

“Uh, no thanks,” I replied, feigning indifference. “Tried it once, didn’t much like it.”

He drained the bottle en route, and after pulling into the gravel parking lot that in two years would become the site of the Houston Astrodome, he reached under the seat again and produced a snub-nosed pistol. “Just in case we run into trouble with the niggers,” he said, laying the pistol on the edge of the seat, its nose pointing toward my left leg.

The idea of crazed Negroes leaping from behind a parked car, demanding our money or our lives, seemed less likely than Bill finding an excuse to use the pistol on an innocent baseball fan.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred African-Americans attending games at Colt Stadium in 1962 bought their tickets in the right-field bleachers, where a smattering of Caucasians drank their beer quietly and cheered sparingly for Pete Runnels, Walter Bond, Bob Aspromonte, and Turk Farrell. Not the blatant white-supremacist Bill Broden. His idea of integration was guzzling a pint of whiskey and a gallon of lukewarm beer and heckling whichever Alou brother was playing right field for the Dodgers that night. In a lenient court of public opinion, addressing Felipe Alou with “Hey, boy!” might have been fobbed off as drunken stupidity, but to invite every black man and woman within earshot to kiss his stinking white ass qualifies as unthinkable. I couldn’t help visualizing the pistol in his khakis as anything but an errant spark in the vicinity of a ruptured gas main.

Most of the responses—along the lines of, “Hey, whitey, why don’t you stick a sock in it”—went unnoticed. In response to whatever chiding did manage to register in his alcohol-soaked brain, the best he could muster was “I paid for these seats, and I’m by God sayin’ any damn thing I want to.” This he slurred with his back to the playing field and his head who knows where.

Whether Drysdale had good stuff that night I can’t say. My souvenir images are the seething glares of the flagrantly offended. If I could’ve willed myself far away from Colt Stadium, the dark side of the moon wouldn’t have been far enough from the action. It was the longest nine innings of my life.

Even worse than going to the game was sleeping on Bill Broden’s fold-out couch. I wasn’t so young that I hadn’t noticed my father’s appetite for trashy dalliance; he’d gone so far as to drag me to some chain-smoking barmaid’s apartment under the guise of playing big brother to her six-year-old son. If packing me off to Colt Stadium with a paranoid, alcoholic, numbskull racist strained my paternal adulation, he shattered it by sentencing me to spend the night with the snoring bastard in a trash-heap trailer reeking of Siamese-cat piss so he could take advantage of my mother’s hospitalization. As much as I hated Bill Broden, that night I hated him more.

My chilly acceptance of the boxing gloves embarrassed my father. What was mild anger led him to poor judgment and, in turn, ridicule. “I reckon the little sissy’d rather put on one of his momma’s dresses than a pair of boxin’ gloves,” he said, thinking it would rile me into putting on the gloves.

But something else happened. I heard myself tell him this: “You’re just like every other son-of-a-bitch bully in Jacinto City. You can stick them gloves up your ass.”

His reflexes were lightning fast, and no sooner had the words left my mouth than his right hand landed flush against my left cheek, sending a swarm of cuckoo birds in orbit around my head, and my body to the floor.

Nearly knocking his twelve-year-old son out cold put my father in an awkward situation. Saving face in front of his boorish friend meant stifling the urge to scoop me off the floor to check for head trauma. Instead, the two of them headed for the nearest icehouse to drink the dull misery out of the remainder of the day.

Later that night, lying in bed, I heard the Studebaker grind to an asthmatic halt somewhere in the vicinity of the driveway. “Good mood,” I called to my mother, who’d spent a long night biting her fingernails and chain-smoking Viceroys. I hopped from the bed geared up for a giddy homecoming. The effects alcohol had on my father’s ability to park the car rarely, if ever, affected how he carried himself physically. I’d seen him vomit, heard him moan in his sleep, and marveled when he put a brave face on one of his blistering hangovers, but never had I witnessed him stumbling blind-drunk through the front door with one eye swollen shut, a busted lip, and splotches of blood decorating the front of his shirt. He was crooning “Under Your Spell Again” loud enough for the Bucks to join in singing harmony, if they’d happened to be in the mood. By his account of the evening, my mother and I gleaned that chasing whiskey with beer is counterproductive to settling a heated discussion on the subject of disciplining smart-mouthed boys. Judging by his good humor, he’d got the better of Bill in the brawl. “I finally woke up to his ass,” he said, as if with this one statement he’d explained the mysteries of the cosmos.