CHAPTER 135: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET SENSUAL SECRETS NEW FRIENDS & ON THE ROAD 1973-1974

 CHAPTER 135 NEW FRIENDS BUT STILL ON A BAD ROAD. 1973-1974

 

Since I was now earning a decent amount of money, I purchased a bar for our apartment. Somehow we had come to believe having a well-stocked bar in your place was the height of sophistication. It was a status symbol of

success. Our bar was very well-stocked with a large variety of booze, Wild Turkey Bourbon, Bacardi 151 Rum, Smirnoff Vodka, Crown Royal Whiskey and many more. I had several mixology books and by the time we were high up in Cherry Hill Towers getting high, I had gotten a handle on making cocktails. Back in Philadelphia at the Commodore I almost killed Lois one night.

 Lois’ drink of choice was a Manhattan, so this particular evening I decided to make her one. I had bought a little cocktail kit. I took the shaker and added some ice. I opened a book I had and read the recipe. It said use 8 parts whiskey to one-part Vermouth. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I assumed a jigger constituted one part. I added in 8 jiggers of whiskey and one jigger of vermouth. Dashed some bitters on top, put on the lid and shook that baby up. I poured it out into a glass and she drank it down.

Talk about woozy drunk. She staggered about and announced she

felt sick, then headed into the bathroom to throw up. There was a loud crash and I hurried after her. She lay upon the bathroom floor where she had passed out, falling head first against the toilet so hard it cracked the tank.   Fortunately, she survived 

 We didn’t see them quite as often after moving to New Jersey, but we did continue getting together with Bill and Grace weekly for our usual evenings of cards and drinking. I did no more experimenting with making cocktails. Bill had once went to Bartender school, with hopes of becoming a bartender, which was not a sane occupation for an obvious alcoholic  But he had learned how to make a decent mixed drink.

 

Besides the Stones, we still got together with Joe Rubio
occasionally.  Here he is cooking dinner on an outdoor grill at his Drexel Hill home, newly purchased a bit after his service. He had come out of his silent period and overcome the residue of  PTSD. 

 

Wayne and Bunny were out of the picture. It helped us split  with them when we disappeared across the Delaware River into South Jersey, new address, new telephone number and not long after, a new employer. We certainly never had a nude Bunny at the front door or heard from them again.

I did not fear the idea we would become swingers as my wife did. The deciding moment for me was when the four of us went shopping together at the Concord Mall in Delaware. As we browsed the stores, Wayne began commenting on the curves and enticements he felt for the read ends of passing emails. What shocked me were he was pointing out girls of junior high age. I felt he was a predator and not a good companion to associate with.

At my new employer, Welder Tube, I met a fellow who would become my closest friend for most of the next decade. His name was Victor Ernest and he had originally immigrated to the USA from St Lucia. 

  He had been with Welded Tube for a few years and his position
as Cost Accountant was above mine of Assistant Bookkeeper when I started. Yet in a few months our roles became reversed, he was still the Cost Accountant, but I was basically his boss. He had no difficulty with the situation for the most part, although he preferred to keep it quiet that I was his boss, even pretend it wasn’t so.  Despite this, we become close friends and he remained such for the next several years. We were together a lot, certainly at work, but socially as well. We began playing tennis every lunch hour, putting up a makeshift net of string between lamp posts in the parking lot. We also took up golf and played every weekend. Sometimes we even got together on weekends and played tennis on a real court.  

We were just average weekend golfers. My best score at a full-sized golf course was 95 at the Westwood Country Club in Woodbury, New Jersey.  This Club allowed the public to play their course. It was a lovely course.

We were playing one time when a sudden thunderstorm came roaring in  overhead.  It was something of a dilemma as we were on the farback nine, a long way from the clubhouse and any solid shelter. Mostly this was open field. They tell you not to stand in an open field during lightning, but the only thing around was a solitary tree, but they also say don’t stand under a tree in a storm either. All we did was walk a bit of a distance away from our bags of metal clubs. We got wet, but I’m here writing this, so obviously we survived the incident.`

We only played at Westwood Country Club when we could afford the green fees, which were not low. More often we played at an Executive Golf Course, called the Golf Farm. An Executive Course had nine holes, but two cups cut into each green. You played the nine, then played them again but to a  different cup to make your 18-hole course. We played here because the green fees were pretty cheap. The golf farm sat right up against a private country club, where I doubt fees were cheap A lot of luxury went in and out of the clubs parking lot.  One day as I came along the fairway near the drive into that club, this guy stopped along the side and took out his driver and some balls from his Caddilac’s trunk. He began driving them directly into the Golf Farm course, darn near hitting me. He then got in his car and continued on to the country club parking lot. Monied privilege!

One time we were playing a round when we came up behind two
women. Instead of just  waiting for them to finish a hole, we suggested playing as a foursome. At the break after the first nine, Victor headed to the rest room and one of the women also trotted off somewhere. After chit-chatting with the pretty dark haired lady who stayed behind with me, she suddenly suggested we go to her apartment, which was just down the road, she said, and she would make us lunch. Then she began to tell me her husband’s business kept him on the road for long stretches and he was away and how lonely she got. I turned her down on her offer of lunch and the other two returned and we finished the back nine.

I had taken the lady’s offer at face value, just a lunch thing. When I told Lois about it later she gave me a look, shaking her head.

“You are so naïve,” she said.

As far as my scores, I didn’t measure my improvement by those. I measured it by how many balls I loss. When we first began we would lose several, either in the water hazard or in the rough. Eventually I reached a point where I was finishing with the same ball I started with and  then I felt I was really improving.

Victor hated to lose a ball anywhere. They cost money, you know,
since we both used Titleist, which can run over two dollars a ball.  He would tramp about in the woods or roughs for a long time before giving up on a ball and if he couldn’t find it he was unhappy the rest of the day. I might look about a bit, but was willing to continue with a new ball rather than spend time searching. 

Psychologically the worse hazard was the water hazard. The Golf Farm had a lake you had to tee off over. The distance you had to clear was easily carried on any other hole, but staring at the water drained away one’s confidence and more likely than not we would drive our balls straight into the water. Victor really hated this hole. We both went to a driving range and bought a bunch of used balls cheap. Many of these were floaters, too, so you could sometimes fish them out of the drink with the long periscoping rod I carried in my bag. This rod had a little wire cup on one end for scooping up any drowning balls.

 Vic was kind of obsessive-compulsive. He would arrive at work and head right to the men’s room where he would wash up and fuss with his hair and beard, even though he had showered and groomed himself at home. He often spent 45 minutes in this ritual.

His pride and joy was his yellow Porsche 914. He used to park it
right next to the office along the driveway instead of back in the parking lot. He could keep an eye upon it out the office window and he didn’t want anyone parking near him that might ding or scratch his baby. 

 The structural steel tubing was fabricated in the long building behind the offices. Flatbed 18-wheelers would come in through the front gate, turn up the drive and deliver these great coils of steel to the plant. These coils were very large and very heavy. One day we heard a loud thud just outside the offices. We ran to the windows. Somehow as a truck turned onto the drive, the restraints gave way and one of these giant coils slid off. It made a large dent in the drive and only missed Victor’s little car by a couple of inches. He never parked along the drive again.

 

Victor had a girlfriend named Marsha, who he eventually married, so the four of us, he and Marsha, me and Lois, did a lot of things together, but there was no sex involved in this relationship. There was still a lot of imbibing at our parties, though.

That was a mainstay of our socializing throughout the early
1970s, parties and plenty of booze. Victor’s parties never got us as drowned in  the stuff as at Bill and Grace’s, no one got falling down drunk or spoke of Harapozoids. We mainly loosened up and spent time singing and laughing. 

We were to continue visiting this group of friends from 1973 to fall of 1975 when something would happen that changed a lot in our lives. At the party pictured Victor is playing my guitar. The others are a Jewish Couple named Moss with their young son, David.

I had met Joe Rubio in 1967 and he was still a friend in this period. Victor Ernest became a close friend in early 1973. Both of these would still be friends into the 1980s. Our boozing with Bill and Grace began in 1972, but ended in 1975. Our sexual dalliances with Wayne and Bunny had begun in 1972, but were over by 1973 when we moved to Jersey.

This did not mean our risky sexual proclivities ended.

On September 15, 1973, Lois and I headed to Wisconsin on vacation. It had been a long time coming before we earned enough to take a real vacation. Our last real one had been the trip to New York and the tour of Virginia in 1962, our second year of marriage. Since then we had taken a number of day trips, a few overnight stays and one drive out to Cleveland, but that was hardly a vacation since we just drove straight to that city and then straight back home. This was a  ten-day trip across several states. The first leg was sort of a dash on interstates, crossing Ohio on up through Gary and Chicago, with no stops. We then went right up to the Wisconsin Dells, after a side trip to Baraboo because I wanted to see the Circus Museum there. We stayed in the Spinning Wheel Motel one night in Baraboo (left)

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Circus had long fascinated me, especially the Ten-in-one or sideshow or Freak Show, whatever you wish to call it. Circus World is a museum dedicated to the history and all things circus. Owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, it was built in Baraboo because that was the home of the Ringling Brothers. Ringling began their first circus tour out of the town in 1884.

From there we went to The Dells for a couple days. My regret is I
had a fairly new movie  camera at the time and I took a lot of films on the trip and not many photographs. I still have the films in a metal box, but nothing to view them since I got rid of my projectors a few years back. If I ever have any spare money, I will take my movies to a place that can convert them to DVDs. I do remember we took a tour boat through the dells while there.

We took the long way home, cutting through Minnesota, then Indiana. We found a wonderful little local bar-restaurant in some small town in Indiana. It wasn’t a tourist destination, but a place where the locals ate. The place served great steaks and potatoes. We also had some car trouble in Indiana. The carburetor needed adjusting or something, but we were able to get it fixed quickly and continue our tour.

We began driving through Iowa. I decided we would continue into Missouri and stop over at Hannibal where there was a lot of Mark Twain stuff to visit, but we didn’t make it. After hours of driving through repetitive flat farm land and hearing obituaries being read on the radio along with pork belly market reports, we made a left turn east halfway down the state and headed home.

 One of the few pictures I did take is of Lois in the Redwood Center Motel in Angola, Indiana. If much of our life sounds typically humdrum, the drinking and parties aside, our sexual behavior was not. For instance, I often parted the curtains slightly when we stayed in motels on the idea people might peek in and see us making love. Our risk taking sex life continued in these years, just as I continued buying pornography and going to the xxx films or strip shows.

Several of the adult bookstore now added cubicles or booths in the back where you could  view pornography movies in privacy. Some even added such booths where a curtain would part revealing a naked woman who would do “tricks” for you as long as you pushed money through a slot. Sitting in those booths viewing such “performers” as Annie Sprinkle  (use your imagination), I never gave a thought to all the previous men who had sat on that same bench doing whatever they might be doing while watching a filthy film. The films weren’t the only thing dirty about such places, the interiors were none too clean either.

Home again at the Cherry Hill towers at the end of 1973, we moved again.