CHAPTER 136. MOVING AGAIN AND MORE SEX. 1973 - 1974
There was a problem, well, more than one, with the Cherry Hill Towers. It was kind of disheveled when we lived there. I got stuck in the freight elevator once, but since we lived on the twelfth floor I wasn’t about to skip using the lift. Being on a high floor could bring inconveniences. After we moved in, I bought us this living room suite.
and this gigantic sofa and love seat. The sofa was super long and you slid the love seat up against one end. It was called a sectional. It was gold in color, a much brighter gold than it appears in the photo, like a summer sun it was.
We had bought it and paid for delivery and therein lay the difficulty. Two burly men showed up at our floor and hauled in everything except the long couch. One man handed me a sheet to sign and said they couldn’t fit the sofa in the freight elevator.
“Oh, then take it back,” I said.
“Can’t do that,” he says. “Against company policy. We left it down in the basement.” And he left.
Being how in those days I was obstinate, stubborn and confident in my problem solving abilities, I rode down to the basement to check out the situation. Man, yes, that sofa was big. I’m six foot and on end it towered over me. There had been two of those guys, but only just one of me, which made handing that monster a bit awkward, but after a time of twists, turns and mutterings, I got it into that elevator, out of that elevator, down our corridor and through our apartment door to the living room.
bathroom, I was defeated. It made going in there a miserable proposition and I also expected our red-flocked wallpaper to un-flock. Didn’t want to ruin the décor, you know, even if it did look like a bathroom in a brothel.
I contacted the management office, but this resulted in absolutely nothing being done. The landlord was holed up in New York City and cared not a fig for his South Jersey residents. When our lease expired we moved for the seventh time in our dozen years of marriage. Counting my first home after birth, this would be the twelfth address for me.
People sometimes find it hard to believe our next address after Cherry Hill was The Chalets at Ski Mountain. A ski resort in flat Jersey? Yes, it was in Pine Hill, the highest elevation in South Jersey. It was a new and lovely complex when we moved there on December 1, 1973, with many conveniences, even a trash compactor in the kitchen. True, in winter we had to bare the hum of the snow making machines
running overnight, but you get used to it. Of course, it snowed for real just after the New Year. On the 8th we left work at noon and the snow continued all the next day. On January 10 it turned bitterly cold and everything froze.
Ski Mountain remained the winter attraction during the five years we lived at Chalet. The summer attraction was Clementon Amusement park, which was on Blackwood-Clementon Road just a few miles away. Clementon was the home of Tom Newman, my 1959 friend at the Florence Utz School. The park was only two blocks from his house where I stayed a couple of times that summer.
Clementon Park has been recently opened and operating, but Ski Mountain is long gone. That hill went through several iterations after we moved away. In the 1980s a water park was built on the site and called Action Mountain Park. It was an offshoot of the infamous Action Park, a North Jersey amusement park, in Vernon, known as “The most dangerous amusement park in America” and listed in “Weird New Jersey”. Action Mountain Park was perhaps not
as dangerous as its parent, no one seems to have died on its rides, but from what I have learned people generally came away from it bruised and banged up.
Action Mountain closed down sometime in the nineties and in 2000 the Trump National Golf Club-Philadelphia was built upon the site. (Yes, that Donald Trump.) It was a 6,969 yard course designed by Tom Fazio and had a five-star rating. It featured a lavish 43,000 square foot clubhouse. It was formally called Pine Hill Golf Club until purchased and named after Donald Trump (naturally) on Christmas Eve 2009.
Throughout 1974 and well into 1975, Lois and I provided our own amusement park, let’s call it Sexland. Sexland would exist anywhere and anytime we chose. There could be fondling under the table in restaurants. When we ate out we sat on the sides that formed the right angle corner of the table; not across from each other. This allowed easy reach for fondling each
other. Lois would wear short dresses and no underwear. She would often unzip my pants and grab me. She would undress as we drove and then truckers could gaze at her as we passed the big rigs.
Although we had stopped any group sex activities after Wayne and Bunny, we were prone to risky public acts and displays. Lois bought a wrap dress, something introduced that year by Diana Von Furstenberg. As its name implied, it was a dress of one piece, but had no buttons. A woman put her arms through the sleeves and then wrapped the material about her, doubling one side over the other in front and tying it in place with a belt or sash. The thing was easy to manipulate. The bodice could be pulled apart to differing widths to show cleavage or more skin.
Lois seldom not wear underwear or removed it in the car when we went out. I as general going commando, too. We often left certain restaurants and as soon as we started across the parking lot, she would undo the belt, which allowed the wrap dress to open fully in the front. Eventually, as our activity grew more emboldened, we went to a nearby hotel lounge. It had a L-shaped setup with the bar on the short part. This was where most people were when we went there, but the long side was generally empty then and we took a booth in that section. This allowed Lois to undo the wrap dress and basically sit there nude, though whipping the material around her if a waitress approached.
We took to having sex in public places during the day. We did it behind a tree behind Lafayette’s Headquarters in the Brandywine battlefield. In Downingtown, where I spent my boyhood, where I once stole girlie magazines from Charles’ Newsstand, we wandered to the back of Kerr Park along the Brandywine. There was a natural stage there before a grove of pine trees. They used to put on plays during summer eves, using the pine grove as the dressing rooms. We went back and had sex pressed against one of the pines. I could see out through the trunks at the people strolling the area and some kids playing tag or some such game.
parking lot for the Washington memorial Chapel, where once Bob Condon and I wrote songs up in the bell tower. There was a picnic area maybe 50 yards away and I could see a family setting up their picnic during our activity hoping they couldn’t see us through the grass.
So why relate these secret things that no one need ever to know? Because one must show what they once were in order to show change. How do others know of your salvation, if they never knew how far you came down the wide path toward perdition? People who had been alcoholics relate how they were fallen down drunk, how they threw up on the hostess’ dress at parties, how they had accidents on the highway when in their cups. Reformed druggies might confess to days of thief or muggings to support their habit, how they boosted hubcaps from parked cars or snuck into buildings to rip off items to fence.
Lois and I and our artistic friends were hanging out in Rittenhouse on Saturday nights. We would young by the central fountains and talk with the mix of street people passing through into the wee hours. I’d meet varied persons who would become characters in my stories eventually.
In the park in the dark passing shadows
Change with the changing hour and the seasons.
In ragged second store dress,
Stocking runs, bell-bottom denim, dour
Pea Jacket blue. The men who love men; Druggies on their prowls;
Hippie girls with flowers in their tresses;
Poets and writers and actors and pals adding to
The bowers where my words grew.
In The City of Change 2009
I wasn’t a drunk or a crack-head or a thief. I was simply a sex addict. I wasn’t raping or assaulting any one. I wasn’t jumping out of bushes to expose myself to strangers passing by. That was my justification, of course. I was harming no one and no one really knew, so what was the harm. It certainly made the behavior easier not believing in any God that might be displeased. As I stated before, as an Atheist I believed the only real purpose to life was seeking pleasure.
Perhaps pleasure wasn’t so prevalent as I tried to believe. I was 33. I had changed addresses 12 times, been rejected from the armed services because of psoriasis, was working at my seventh employer in 16 years, dropped out of art school and quit Temple University. Yes, I had writings published, my latest being an article in “Animal Lover’s Magazine”. I didn’t feel satisfied with anything and was often angry. I marched in protests and argued with ministers and saw friends, the few I had, come and go. I spent a lot of time drinking with those I befriended. I had 6 dead babies. I was 33 and saw no future for myself other than drifting along as I had been and hoping more stories would sell, while in reality I was selling less.
“Where have all the Flowers Gone?”, now we could ask, “Where have all the Hippies Gone?” It appeared creativity was dissolving away and protest as well as the long Vietnam War ended. It was an age of disillusion perhaps we were the new Lost Generation. The Beatles disbanded. The Trauma and Kaleidoscope were closed. Folk music was disappearing from the
hit parade and the bland music of Disco was beginning to dominate. People escaped into dance and disengaged from causes. The Fugs and Country Joe (right Country Joe McDonald) and the Fish had been replaced by the Bee Gees and Village People.
Richard Nixon became the first person to resign the presidency. The moon shot was disappearing to history.
In 1973, Elmer Wilson (left in the lighter suit), the father of Richard, Tommy and Suzy, died at the age of 59. In 1974, my father’s longtime friend Joe Bender, the father of Dotty Bender Walls died in May, also at the age of 59. Dotty’s marriage had broken apart, she had been incarcerated at Embreeville State Hospital and her ex-husband was sent to jail for child molestation. In November, Joe Rubio’s mother died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 45.
One wondered what 1975 would bring. Probably more of the same old same old.
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