When I graduated from Madison High School, my mother was teaching English there and pop was disabled from an injury at CIBA pharmaceuticals in Summit. She loved Edmond Spenser and John Milton and had majored in English lit at Douglass College at Rutgers. She tried to teach at nights at Morris County Community College, hoping for an upper-division course, but all they wanted was for mom to conduct classes in ESL.
There were five of us kids. I was the oldest, and mom had little spare cash for us to go to college, But I was a fairly good point guard for the school’s basketball team and got a scholarship to Freedom University in Norfolk, Virginia. Mom shuddered at my going to a Protestant fundamentalist school, but Georgetown and Gonzaga did not offer me a scholarship, as I reminded her. She feared I would lose my Catholic bearing, and she was right, I did.
When I arrived in Norfolk, I had most of my expenses covered, but I needed some spending money — not that there was much social life that was approved by the university, Even at dances couples had to stay six inches apart, and avoid any public displays of affection (PDA). Since most of us were adolescents that policy was simply unenforceable.
I was offered a work-study job mowing the lush lawn of the president’s residence, The second time I worked there, the day was scorching Dixie hot, and I took off my t-shirt and still was sweating as I pulled the power mower around. After I finished, the president’s wife, Becky, called me over and offered me some lemonade, We went into the huge kitchen, and as I poured her long fingers played up and down my pectoral muscles. She observed, ”I can tell you are an athlete. Basketball, isn’t it? My husband has big plans for the team.”
Then she asked me to help her move the bureau in the master bedroom, and before I knew it, she had pulled into bed a not very resistant me. It happened so fast I almost got my marvelous membrane caught in my shorts’ zipper. She had been around the block, as we say in Jersey, and then the second time she suggested that she give me more than enough cash “so next time we can go to the Timberlake Motel on the highway off Sunburst Road.” Once, I said that we had to be careful, otherwise her husband would find . Still, I relished doing his wife with his own money.
“Look, honey, he and I have one thing in common, we both like well-built young men.”
“Oh, I thought he was rather pure.”
“Only pure with his wife.”
When the academic year ended in June, I went home to Madison and took a summer job at Rose City Jewelers. Becky found affection in the arms of a Black transfer student from Coker University in South Carolina. He too was a basketball player.
Over the years, I enjoyed fundamentalist girls who were religious, but deeply repressed in the most bizarre ways. Holy but horny. One girl told me she was staying a virgin until her wedding night, but would engage in oral sex with me. I dated in my senior year a country girl who was not prudish, who was called Varina, named after Jefferson Davis’ wife. She did it repeatedly, and we finally talked of marriage. Her family was farmers in the interior part of the state near Farmington, and she insisted that they would pay for the full reception. At the University, she had fallen under the spell of Pastor Fritz, a Christian fundamentalist minister, who also taught comparative religion. He was a fast-talking, silver-tongued orator who slipped his precious thing into co-eds in his darkened office in the old gymnasium. I didn’t think he soiled my bride-to-be, but apparently, he had “known” Betsy in the Biblical sense.
Our wedding was scheduled after graduation in June in The Alleluia Park, a converted Acme market, which had a pitched roof where the insignia could still be seen imprinted on, and a huge blinking sign in the parking lot that said,” Jesus Saves.” It used to have grocery specials displayed at different times on the screen. The converted grocery store had windows covered with colored plastic strips to imitate stained glass. The Pastor arrived in a maroon BMW with his prayerbook in hand. “The Lord be praised,” he cried out. He looked like I imagined Ichabod Crane to look. He was tall, thin, with a huge Adam’s apple, He smiled at all of us, shook a few hands, and invited us into the chapel.
My mother came from Newark Airport, but my dad and my siblings couldn’t afford the airfare to Norfolk. She seemed a bit lost by it all. Mom had fantasied that her firstborn would be married in her home parish in Madison, St. Vincent Martyr. But I had no real ties to being Catholic, and my cousin, a parish priest, had been defrocked for child abuse in North Jersey, So it was Pastor Fritz’s show.
My intended, Varina, insisted on wearing white, which was rather weird since she had a two-month baby bump which her mother was so proud of. I wondered if her family believed in Baptism for the new one. They were not fundamentalists and were in fact hard drinking country folk. The ceremony was remarkably short. Fritz reminded us that “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” He was on his third wife.
Then the ceremony was mercifully over, the good Reverend jumped into his Winnebago van and left his BMW in the parking lot of Alleluia Park. “Paise the Lord, we were married,” my wife said. The reception was held in the basement of the Acme, er the chapel, and the family had hired a fiddle player, her uncle Floyd, to play something called bluegrass music.
The reception was heavy on liquor but short on food. The liquor was sold by the shot or the bottle to interested parties. Even a Coke was $1.00; this was a pay-as-you-go wedding. Suddenly her mother, Daisy, disappeared, and returned dressed not in the matronly Betty Crocker gown she wore in the chapel, but in hot pants and a T-shirt that read on her breasts, “Do it to me.” She danced her heart out as my mother sat quietly at a side table, staring blankly at what she considered “white trash.”
My bride got tanked that night. As Varina danced in her virgin white gown, she would stop as the guests put dollars down her plunging neckline, I guess it was a family tradition. I had never seen that except at a strip bar in Louisville, Kentucky.
On and on it went, Daisy and her daughter never stopped, and that night as husband and wife we headed for the Super 8 Wyndham. As I gathered up my courage for a great wedding night, she fell asleep dead drunk. In the morning we re-consummated our deep love.
Neither of us had any money, so we rented a used, rusted trailer and lived in a local campsite near Norfolk. I had a wife and a bun in the oven and looked for a job. I became a cable installer for Spectrum although I hated the outdoors, and six months later, there was a position in the customer service center of the local Spectrum store. I applied for it and got the job. It paid nearly the same as the installer position.
My job was to convince senior citizens that they were getting a good deal, but every six months or so the rates would jump up. Living on Social Security and modest pensions, customers would come into the store and complain about soaring costs. I would simply tell them that it was the Federal government’s fault; the Democrats kept on raising the rate, like FDR did taxing telephone bills in World War II.
That was the script, and I added empathy and concern for the poor old bastards. Hell, we all are barely making ends meet, But after several years of cheating seniors, I began to experience an existential crisis. Is this all there is? What is life about? I had by then three kids and a sullen wife who used to work part-time at Wawa near the highway.
Then one day as I passed the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church on Norfolk Avenue. I thought about the afterlife and what was the purpose of being here. I decided to visit clergyman Fritz, I searched for him on the computer in the local library and found his old preaching hall. I called the secretary, and she said the good Pastor had retired years ago. She had though a forwarding address, which was right near me.
I tracked him down to a storefront that had only his name in gold lettering on the window. I went in and there he was—thirty pounds heavier and nearly bald. But still the same old smile. I told him “I am here to get some spiritual counseling. You told me when we were married if I ever need guidance to call.”
“Yes, I remember you, but I am out of that business.”
“How does one leave the ministry?”
“It’s easy, you just walk away. You need a change of direction, my son.”
“That is why I came to you. What are you saying?”
“I have gone into cyber currency sales.”
“What is that ?”
“Cyber currency is the new international dollar, and my job is to convince people to put their wealth into those investments.”
“I am not sure I understand.”
“None of us does, it’s kind of a shell game, and I am on the bottom floor of the program. Are you interesting in joining me? I have more clients than I can service?”
And so, I became a cyber currency specialist and made enough money that my beloved wife, Varina, could quit Wawa, and get her teaching certificate.
I joined all the service clubs to make friends and influence people: the Elks, the Lions, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Toastmasters. One day the guy who was to give the speech at Toastmasters got food poisoning, and I was asked to fill in without any preparation. I did rather well, and after it was over, a well-healed man came up to me and said “You did splendidly. I am the Republican chairman for this county and I think we can put you over as a candidate for the House of Delegates. You know that is where Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry got their start.”
Wow, what a great country this is.
