Posts Tagged love

ENGINEER’S GUIDE TO ROMANCE

It all started with the Cushman Motor Scooter.

It took me many years to figure out what had stunted my growth in understanding women. But it started with Johnny Barton’s 1950 motor scooter. It was grey-green and had a box shape, not like the later more flashy Vespa, made popular in Italian movies, but Johnny’s was the envy of all his classmates.

John Barton was my high school friend who, from my view, really knew how to get girls. Even though he lived in town and could have walked everywhere, he rode around on his motor scooter. He was movie star handsome with clothes to match, his black hair slicked back around his olive-tan skin face. He must have had something on his hair to keep the wind from blowing it around. His girl of the moment would ride on the back with her arms around him, her hair blowing in the breeze.

I imagined that he had all the girls he wanted. This may have been a bad influence on him. He became a preacher.

But I wanted to be like Johnny Barton. I had saved seventy-five dollars over the years and told my mother that I was going to buy a motor scooter. She must have been horrified to think of the danger. We lived outside town so I would be riding on some busy streets.

I had just turned fourteen—the driving age in Arkansas, as long as you had a licensed adult with you. My father had taken me out in the family car a few times to show me how to drive. I realized later how terrified he must have been when I tried to teach my son how to drive,

Shortly after my announcement to my mother about the scooter, she had my father take me to a used car lot. Boy. My own car. Much better than a scooter.

“We‘ll pick out something you can afford,” he said.

The salesman said, “You have seventy-five dollars?” He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “The only one on the lot you can afford is this 1934 Ford four door sedan. It runs real good.”

He started it up for us and left it running. He waved at the open door.

“Take it for a drive.”

It was honey brown, exactly like the Bonny and Clyde car that got shot up in Louisiana. And only sixty bucks. I peeled off sixty dollars of my hard-earned savings and handed it to the tobacco chewing salesman. I jumped in to drive it following my dad back home.

He didn’t seem to be concerned about the lack of a licensed driver being with me. In fact, neither of my parents ever rode with me in my 1934 Ford.

In spite of my expectations that my love life was about to improve, things got worse. First all, I need funds to run this car.

I was at the age that all I could think about was how to get girls. But this required a car which needed gasoline and, I learned later, expensive repairs. So now I not only spent all my waking hours thinking about girls, but also how to get the money to run the car to get the girls.

Then the starter went out. So I began saving up to repair the starter. In the meantime, I got the Ford running by rolling down the hill in front of the house and popping the clutch to get it started. But I needed to pick up my friends, Benny Barber and Don Luny, anytime I went somewhere so they could push it to get it running again. They were both bulky football players, so we always could get it going.

After the starter was fixed, I still needed money for gas, so I would pick them up, and maybe David Phillips. I always tried to talk them into paying for some gas. They thought I was rich, so getting any money from them was nearly impossible.

With this arrangement, if we did get girls to ride with us, making out was limited for me. They necked and played with the girls in the back seat while I drove. And because I had to scrimp and save for the car, we never took the girls anywhere if we had to spend money. Like a movie or, God forbid, a dinner. So this limited my involvement with girls, instead of enhancing it like I had hoped. So for these two years driving the 1934 Ford, I really didn’t capitalize on the opportunity.

Then came my big chance to earn steady money. We moved to Aiken, South Carolina where I took over a morning paper route with 212 customers. Then the newspaper, the Augusta Herald, decided that I was dependable and had a car so they hired me to deliver the bundles of the afternoon paper to the other paperboys in our area. I was now in the big time.

The only problem was that most of my non-school hours were taken up by this work. For my last two years of high school, I got up at five in the morning. Every single day for two years. Except on Sunday, when I had to get up at two in the morning to deliver the other paperboys their Sunday papers. Then I would deliver my 212 customers.

Dating was difficult, since I would be going to sleep at about nine o’clock at night. Saturday night dates were especially stressful, since I knew I would have to get up at two. But the parents of the girls I did take out must have appreciated my bringing them home at an early hour.

Another problem was that, on the rare occasion that I got a girl in the car alone and parked on a dark street, I really had no idea of how to approach a girl. My mother had warned me, that I could do anything I wanted to on a date, but don’t you bring a girl home pregnant. I knew how to get a girl pregnant, so this knowledge placed a pall over my actions.

I figured out many years later that many girls, like all boys, were hot for sex. I had thought all those years that you had to sneak up on girls. Maybe get them drunk. But the group I ran around with couldn’t get beer or liquor. So I was never able to try that.

Actually what kept the girls up tight was the danger of getting pregnant. In those days, if a girl allowed a boy to fulfill his desires, and maybe hers, she would get pregnant.

So I led a pretty monastic existence the two years of Aiken High School.

Then came the real killer. I went to college to Yale which had no girls. The closest girls were at Connecticut College, fifty miles away. You had to have a car. The same problem all over again. Only this time I would need a red convertible instead of a Cushman scooter.

Besides, I couldn’t afford a car along with college. Even if I had a friend with a car, I couldn’t spend a day driving to Conn College. I had to spend all my waking hours grinding on the books for my engineering classes just to keep from flunking out.

I did graduate, but after four more years of monastic life.

I returned to Fort Worth to live with my parents and start a construction business. My mother was concerned about her future as a grandmother, so she introduced me to a stream of TCU girls. She was taking classes at TCU to get a degree in accounting.

One of those cute girls she introduced me to tricked me into marrying her which began my real education about women.

 

I could have killed myself. Up until the Oklahoma City bombing, it seems that anyone could buy dynamite as easy as chocolate bars.

We started Beckman Construction Company in 1959 after I graduated from Yale with a mechanical engineering degree. Our second government contract was construction of twenty-nine toilets at Corps of Engineers’ lakes all over Texas.

My job was to dig the pit for the concrete tanks. The hole would be large enough to bury a Cadillac—6 feet wide, 25 feet long and 5 feet deep. Normally this took four hours with a rented backhoe.

To start work on the eighth toilet, I drove to Killeen to pick up my laborer helper, Frank, a strapping black fellow who always had a smile on his face. We headed to Lake Belton in my green 1951 Chevrolet flatbed truck to meet our man with the rented backhoe.

The Corps of Engineers man pointed out where the toilet was to be built.”Right about there,” her said, waving his hand at an open area.

I drug a stick in the dirt to make the outline of the pit. The backhoe man maneuvered his machine around to line up his bucket. He was a big man with a beer gut and brown hair sticking out from his gimie cap. He spit a stream of brown tobacco juice and raised the bucket over my mark scratched in the dirt and set it down.

Clunk! He tried again. Clunk. Rock! Solid! Under three inches of dirt.

Rock? I may as well have been a five year old in a sand box with a toy shovel for what I knew about how to dig rock.

The backhoe operator spit another stream of tobacco down from his perch on the seat of the backhoe and grinned at me. “You should have knowed that there’s rock all over this area.”

He could have told me that before he drove all the way out here. Frank smiled, leaning on a now useless shovel.

I handed the backhoe man a check for his two hour minimum.

“What do I do now?”

“Whal, most people use dynamite.”

Frank straightened up and didn’t have his usual smile.

“Dynamite. Where can I get some dynamite?”

“Waco. Texas Contractor’s Supply.”

Frank and I strode into the store in Waco. I stood in front of the counter to wait. Frank kept his distance. A clerk sauntered up. A young fellow with short blond hair sticking out like a horse grooming brush.

“Yup. Whatcha’ need?”

“I need to buy some dynamite.”

“How much?”

“I’m not sure.”

After I described my problem, he said, “You ‘orter have two cases. Drill about thirty holes, six feet deep. One stick in each hole.” He set two boxes on the counter.

“How do I set these off?”

Bristle-brush-hair shook his head and looked me and Frank up and down. After a deep breath, he turned to pull a box from off a shelf and put it on the counter.

“You fellers ain’t had much experience with dynamite, have you.”

I looked at Frank. He shook his head. I turned back to face the blond clerk. “No.”

“Well these are blasting caps.” He opened the box and pulled out a brass metal tube about the size of a pencil and half as long. It had a coil of wires out one end.

“Put one of these in each stick of dynamite. Connect the all the wires, and hold the ends of the wire to a truck battery. You got your fireworks!”

“Not too complicated.”

“Naw. It’s real easy to get yourself killed.” Frank raised his eyebrows and took another step back.

I signed the ticket for the dynamite, blasting caps, rental on an air compressor and the necessary drilling equipment. Frank helped me hitch up the compressor to the flatbed. I noticed that he kept his distance from the dynamite. I had to load the dynamite and caps into the tool box. We jumped in the truck and headed back to Lake Belton.

By noon the next day, we had drilled a pattern of two inch holes, thirty each, six feet down into the rock and needed a rest before the big show.

We sat in the shade of a post oak tree and ate our lunch of salami sandwiches and finished ‘em off with big red soda pops. Well this is it. Thinking back, I should have called my mother, but, as usual, I was focused on getting the job done.

I took the cases of dynamite and blasting caps from the truck tool box while Frank stood back to watch. I lowered one stick of dynamite into each hole, filled the holes with sand and connected all the wires. I twisted these to a pair of wires about fifty feet long and laid the wire on the ground. I had to drive the truck up to reach the wires and opened the hood to expose the battery. This seemed a little close.

Frank and I stood next to the open hood of the truck. With the ends of the wires in my hands, I looked at Frank. “Ready?”

He shrugged his shoulders. I learned later that you are supposed to yell “Fire in the hole!”

I touched the wire ends to the two battery terminals. BOOM! The dynamite exploded in a wonderful eruption in the air. We looked up at the rocks and dirt silhouetted against the blue sky. It now was coming down at us. We dived for cover under the truck.

Ping, plunk, bang, bang, bang. Smoke drifted over us.

I crawled out and stood to look at the truck. No serious damage. Didn’t even break the windshield.

Now we had to make a hole in this pile of rock. After an hour of work with a pick and shovel, I raised my hand.

“Hold it Frank. What are these wires?”

I pulled the rock away from the wire. Not good. This stick didn’t go off. We could have detonated it with a blow from the pick. Frank climbed out of the hole and went over to stand next to the post oak tree, a little behind the truck.

“Don’t worry Frank. You can’t set this off just hitting it with a pick.”

I don’t think he believed me. He stayed at the post oak tree.

I wired this stick to the fifty foot wires and I stood at the front of the truck to touch the wires to the battery. Frank stayed at the post oak tree, but inched his way toward the shelter of the truck. I touched the wires and another geyser of rock and dirt flew into the air. This time smaller, but higher. We dove under the truck again.

Ping, ping, bam! A fist sized rock hit in the bed of the truck. If I do this again, I’ll get a longer wire.

“Ok, Frank. Let’s finish this up.”

I had to man the pick while Frank stood back. I had told him that there was no danger. Then he and I shoveled out some more rocks.

Oh look, more wires! This time two didn’t explode. I went through the same process again to set these off.

Late that afternoon, we finished clearing the hole without finding more dynamite.

Frank said, “I won’t be able to work tomorrow. Maybe next Monday.”

I said, “Ok. I’ll pick you up Monday.”

“Sir. I’m a little short. Could you write me a check for what you owe’s me through today?” It always bothered me that he, a man old enough to be my father would call me ‘Sir.’

I wrote Frank a check and carried him into Killeen to drop him off. I told him he did a good job. As he walked away, I had a feeling that he might not be on the corner Monday where I usually picked him up.

I saw a pay phone and decided to go ahead and call my Mother to let her know I’d be home for dinner.

Comment:

Years later, after Oklahoma City and then 9-11, I wondered what a person would have to go though to get dynamite and blasting caps. Not only the national security to consider, but the litigious society we live in. Probably a huge insurance policy, a long training and apprentice period and a lengthy security check. Oh well. I had dodged another bullet.

An experience in my freshman year at Yale devastated my chance to become a wine connoisseur.

I was worked as a busboy in Silliman residential college as part of my scholarship plan. This was an unusual evening since the meal included a wine for the upperclassmen as a part of some celebration.

The occasion couldn’t been too special since the wine was in paper cups, about the size of two shot glasses, set on the tables at each chair. It couldn’t have been an expensive wine. I noticed that many of the students didn’t drink their wine. Maybe they knew something about the quality of the wine. After all, some of these boys were from the elite upper crust of society. Their families must have discussed wines at their evening meals.

But I had not had previous experiences with wine. And the few times I had tasted beer, it seemed like medicine.

The previous summer on a construction job in Louisiana, my mom let me have a “salty dog” concoction. I remember it was grapefruit juice with gin and salt. It was a Cajun version of a Margarita. But it was tasty and refreshing on a hot afternoon. And my mother didn’t allow me to overdo it.

We busboys were clearing the tables after dinner and I didn’t want to waste all this wine that was left. So I looked to see if any supervisors were watching and downed a few, as I removed the dishes. Alright, maybe more than a few, say twelve.

The alcohol began to take effect on the way back my room on the fourth floor of Vanderbilt dorm. The climb up the stairs was more difficult than usual. I gripped the stair rail with determination and pulled myself up each step. My hands clamped on the handrail. I started to sweat.

I made it to my room and flopped my body down on the bed next to an open window. My head was spinning and my stomach began to churn.

I stuck my head out and put my chin on the cold stone window ledge. All my dinner and the wine flew out and down to the lawn below. Lucky that there were no sidewalks on this side of the building.

For a long time after that, years, the thought of wine and the taste gave my stomach a turn.

But now, many years later, I sat with Marlene in the evenings on our terrace while she sipped a red wine and apparently enjoyed it. The wine seemed to taste good to her and to relax her. Why couldn’t I enjoy wine?

It all became clear to me when our Writer’s Circle read the description of poetry. The message was that the words in most poetry convey many shades of meaning and are full of images. So poetry must be read one word at a time, with the meaning of each word analyzed so that the poem can be enjoyed.

I then realized the same was true of wine. It must be sniffed, held to the light, sipped, and the liquid rolled around in one’s mouth. Each complex aroma, color and subtle taste must be examined.

The poetry that I understand best is Ogden Nash’s, such as: “Candy is dandy, But liquor is quicker.” And Marlene reminds me, “And sex doesn’t rot your teeth.”

But I never could understand some of the more classical poets, like T.S. Eliot and Yeats.

It finally struck me. When I read, I devour a whole sentence or a paragraph at a time, expecting an overall meaning. In the same way that I drank the wine, in huge gulps.

A friend told me, “Speed reading poetry is like chugalugging a bottle of 1929 Château La Fête Rothschild wine.”

All my life I have attacked a task with a focus on completing the task. Read a paragraph and get the meaning quickly. Drink the glass of milk or fruit juice, gulp it down, and move on.

The message here is that I need to slow down and focus on the enjoyment of the wine, savoring the bouquet and taste. And in the same way, read poetry savoring the meaning of each word. Rolling it around in my mind, extracting each subtle flavor and meaning.

So now, I pour myself a small amount of wine and sit with Marlene on the terrace. I sniff the perfume, hold the glass up to the low sunlight to check the legs (I like that thought), take one small sip of the liquid, and roll it around my tongue. I press in my mind that this is nectar that I should be enjoying.

It seems to be working. Sometimes my tongue convinces me that this is pretty good wine. So I make an intelligent comment like, “This wine has authority without being presumptuous.”

Although, when I tell Marlene, “The bouquet of this wine is like old socks burning,” she shakes her head.

I’ll get to poetry next.