was great. I may have been depraved, and I may have been a drunk, maybe I was even town tramp for a while, but I never lost my appreciation for the sun going down behind the Tetons. Even then, I had standards.
Besides, town tramp was a matter of perspective. We’re talking a college coed between 1968 and 1971 here—the very height of the sexual revolution. I slid through that remarkably short gap between the pill and herpes when for the first, possibly the last, time in history the young reveled in sex without consequences. A dozen boys before age twenty-three was not that rare or squalid.
After dark I unscrewed the Yukon bottle, switched on the flashlight, and pulled the notebook from the pack. Between sips, I made a list—one dozen pricks I have known.
Sam
Dothan
Rocky Joe
Park
Randy
Lonnie
Chuck
Joe Bob
Joe Bob
Winston
Akeem
Leon
I went back and put a check next to the ones who sleeping with had made me feel better about myself instead of worse.
Sam
Park
Lonnie I’m not totally convinced happened because if we made it, he was a tequila screw that I blacked out. All I know is I woke up naked beside him in a Cowboy Joe homecoming float, and afterward he told anybody who would listen that we’d made it. Lonnie may have been lying through his teeth. He wouldn’t be the first to say he did when he didn’t or he didn’t when he did.
One of the Joe Bobs was from Archer City, Texas, and the other from Great Falls, Montana, but I couldn’t tell you which was which. The bigger one had a ’58 Corvette tattooed on his chest. I remember that. I met him at a frat party, where he slammed a thirty-two-ounce Miller High Life and said “Lick my chrome, baby.”
Winston was a married English professor specializing in Camus and Kafka. He’s the one who denied me. Akeem was a black guy who collected white women. Honest to God, the headboard of his bed was covered with silver stick-on stars like you give little kids for doing their chores. I asked him what they were for, and he said it was to remind him of the night sky over Mecca. Then when we finished what wasn’t near all it’s built up to be, he jumped from the bed to add a star to the collection.
Even a tramp can be naive.
Sipping the Yukon so as to conserve warmth for the long night, I played with the flashlight beam on the roof of the tent and came to generalizations concerning the male gender. A few, a very few that I’d met, see women as individual people with both good and bad traits and unique fears and needs. The giant majority of boys said things to each other like “Gettin’ any lately?” and “If she’s ugly, put a flag over her head and fuck her for Old Glory.”
Boys plied girls with whiskey in hopes of tricking them into doing stuff they didn’t want to do. If a woman gave anything of herself willingly, boys interpreted it as proof of their manly superiority. The worst insult one boy could hurl at another was to call him female body parts—boob, pussy—or the action most wanted from a woman—cocksucker.
Was I the first female to figure this stuff out? Maybe Lydia knew and wouldn’t tell me for fear of causing disillusionment. At nineteen I’d wanted someone to like me, so I came at this human connection thing open to sincerity, and now at twenty-two I was bitter, cynical, and smart. If I met any of them now, the good ones, the Parks and Sams, they would avoid me like walking gonorrhea. Five years out of high school and I’d lost hope. What a gyp.
***
I filled in the rest of the page with doodles, then I couldn’t think what to do next, so I turned the page and did it again. My problem, besides retrieving my child, was that I could chug the Yukon and turn off my mind, knowing that running out meant we were in for a long night, or I could drink slowly, which meant sobering up between sips. The quandary was kill the bottle and be out of whiskey, or save it as security and never quite cop a proper buzz. I began to regret
Besides, town tramp was a matter of perspective. We’re talking a college coed between 1968 and 1971 here—the very height of the sexual revolution. I slid through that remarkably short gap between the pill and herpes when for the first, possibly the last, time in history the young reveled in sex without consequences. A dozen boys before age twenty-three was not that rare or squalid.
After dark I unscrewed the Yukon bottle, switched on the flashlight, and pulled the notebook from the pack. Between sips, I made a list—one dozen pricks I have known.
Sam
Dothan
Rocky Joe
Park
Randy
Lonnie
Chuck
Joe Bob
Joe Bob
Winston
Akeem
Leon
I went back and put a check next to the ones who sleeping with had made me feel better about myself instead of worse.
Sam
Park
Lonnie I’m not totally convinced happened because if we made it, he was a tequila screw that I blacked out. All I know is I woke up naked beside him in a Cowboy Joe homecoming float, and afterward he told anybody who would listen that we’d made it. Lonnie may have been lying through his teeth. He wouldn’t be the first to say he did when he didn’t or he didn’t when he did.
One of the Joe Bobs was from Archer City, Texas, and the other from Great Falls, Montana, but I couldn’t tell you which was which. The bigger one had a ’58 Corvette tattooed on his chest. I remember that. I met him at a frat party, where he slammed a thirty-two-ounce Miller High Life and said “Lick my chrome, baby.”
Winston was a married English professor specializing in Camus and Kafka. He’s the one who denied me. Akeem was a black guy who collected white women. Honest to God, the headboard of his bed was covered with silver stick-on stars like you give little kids for doing their chores. I asked him what they were for, and he said it was to remind him of the night sky over Mecca. Then when we finished what wasn’t near all it’s built up to be, he jumped from the bed to add a star to the collection.
Even a tramp can be naive.
Sipping the Yukon so as to conserve warmth for the long night, I played with the flashlight beam on the roof of the tent and came to generalizations concerning the male gender. A few, a very few that I’d met, see women as individual people with both good and bad traits and unique fears and needs. The giant majority of boys said things to each other like “Gettin’ any lately?” and “If she’s ugly, put a flag over her head and fuck her for Old Glory.”
Boys plied girls with whiskey in hopes of tricking them into doing stuff they didn’t want to do. If a woman gave anything of herself willingly, boys interpreted it as proof of their manly superiority. The worst insult one boy could hurl at another was to call him female body parts—boob, pussy—or the action most wanted from a woman—cocksucker.
Was I the first female to figure this stuff out? Maybe Lydia knew and wouldn’t tell me for fear of causing disillusionment. At nineteen I’d wanted someone to like me, so I came at this human connection thing open to sincerity, and now at twenty-two I was bitter, cynical, and smart. If I met any of them now, the good ones, the Parks and Sams, they would avoid me like walking gonorrhea. Five years out of high school and I’d lost hope. What a gyp.
***
I filled in the rest of the page with doodles, then I couldn’t think what to do next, so I turned the page and did it again. My problem, besides retrieving my child, was that I could chug the Yukon and turn off my mind, knowing that running out meant we were in for a long night, or I could drink slowly, which meant sobering up between sips. The quandary was kill the bottle and be out of whiskey, or save it as security and never quite cop a proper buzz. I began to regret
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