But in 1958 the girls in my class were hearing breathy, forlorn Elvis Presley over the big horn speakers at the parish fair. Royal American Shows furnished the main attractions there. It was October and chilly, with one rain a week. There were the animal exhibitions, the home arts tents, the rides, the concession booths, the freak shows, and two female variety acts, inside long tents with bleachers and a raised stage. One was “Rock” Brook’s show — white girls — and the other was “Harlem in Havana”—interblended girls all tending to a brown mustard color. Both of them had bands in rickety white plyboard bandstands. I attended the fair three nights in a row, and saw all the girls I knew turn away from their dates and seek as near a decorous spot as they could near the speakers carrying Elvis’s voice. Then their dates would have to sit by them and buy the cerealish hotdogs from the concessions and try to get their girlfriends to eat it while they were hearing Elvis finish his tune. I saw six or seven guys living through the agony of an Elvis song and a hotdog getting lukewarm. The girls would get into this state where their eyes wouldn’t focus and they would open their legs primly to make way for the moisture Elvis caused them. Of course I didn’t know that then. I just watched their dates gripping them and trying to resurge as lovers to them after the tune was over and they were on their way to the home arts tent.
I personally hoped that Elvis, that Hollywood redneck, would drown in his own spit. I hoped that he would knock up some nigger girl and have to marry her and that his career would crash into rust. My opinion of him had changed. I hated him for all the women he detracted from me and the rest of those pathetic amateurs taking girls over to the home arts tent. Now understand that I never had a date, not until senior year and the prpm, when you had to be a headline toad not to have a date. I never had the guts to try, before then. But I felt for the guys who were trying.
I was with another guy, walking past the false “You Must Be Eighteen” barrier to see the creamy mustard Negresses shake in their jeweled brassieres at “Harlem in Havana.” On Friday night at the dollar-fifty show this one gal came on five minutes before midnight and got down to it so you saw her totally nude and even her moss about five seconds before the strobe light went out. I couldn’t accept it; to my mind she became a life-size puppet toward the last. The guy I was with came out talking shrilly about how we’d seen a nude woman. But then the lights came on, and I saw the whole hurriedly screwed-together planks of the bleachers, the stage, and the bandstand, and I couldn’t believe I’d seen an actual nude woman in this sordid tent affair. But she’d been very pretty, with the three dark spots of nipple, nipple, and V’ed hair.
Back in the late fifties, with a couple of classmates standing the first time outside the “Harlem in Havana” tent pavilion and seeing the light-colored Negresses parade out to the outer stage to entice us inside with a few subdued but promising jerks to the band, the girls cloaked in sheeny robes and brassy wedge sandals, I first got the idea that playing hot music on a trumpet might be an exciting thing to do all one’s life. I looked away from the viciously weary faces of the girls to the bandstand balcony above them, where the “Harlem in Havana” banner draped. Up there was a Cuban-seeming fellow with a horn who wasn’t weary. He stood up playing the hell out of a trumpet. He could make that sucker scream, and the drummer was laying down something thick and Latin behind him, and the ferris-wheel lights were shooting out off the brass of his horn so it looked like and sounded like he was holding a wondrous rainbow bird with a golden throat in his hands.
There wasn’t any forgetting that.
5 / Horning In — A
Tonnie Ray was passionately busy all her days at Dream of Pines High. In junior high she was one of those neutral-looking skinnies very much concerned with the concept personality, because she didn’t think she had any, and she was right. So she got together with small groups of like spirits and went around telling, keeping, and betraying in-credibly inconsequential secrets, and that was about it, for Tonnie Ray Reese. She changed skirts every day, and was generally clean, and could be counted on to be scandalized by a shady joke or bad word. When “John was home” the first time, that is, when she had her first menstrual period, she missed a day of school. A girl actually asked about her when she came back. So she missed school every first day of her period for a while. She liked to create that mystery, and liked to reply in coy ways to anybody that asked about her absence — like she would say “I was with John,” which was sort of romantic too. She and her group were the giggling poultry of the recess yard, huddling here and there with their little egg-secrets. But in high school she was very busy; she had gotten desperate. The only boy who’d ever asked her out was an absolute grub. Tonnie Ray wanted to get into a good crowd so badly; she wanted in with the popular crowd. And now she’d quit her old crowd and was really of no crowd. All she thought of was emulating the popular set and it kept her busy and extremely nervous. She would sit by the popular cuties in the cafeteria and listen to all the recent anecdotes on parties and dates, and then laugh along knowledgeably at them. There were several girls like Tonnie Ray at Dream of Pines. They were all equally frantic. Frantic to please, if you were the right person. We called them roaches, mainly, I guess, because they were as addled as maimed insects, and sucked up to such social crumbs as were offered.
I and the couple of guys I ran with paid a bitter kind of attention to Tonnie Ray and her type. We’d watch her collar some cheerleader, or class officer, or football player and start chattering away with them, making out to have crucial deals going with the honchos of the school. The guys and I winked at each other as her nervous voice rose in cries when she spotted somebody important in the hall. I don’t know why Tonnie Ray and all the roaches rubbed us so raw. But we despised them from a special place of hatred in our hearts. We hated them so much that we’d skip lunch and loiter out in the hall in hopes of seeing one of them in the act.
“Look at Tonnie Ray leach up to that cheerleader babe,” I said to a guy.
“I know. Wouldn’t you love to put a shotgun down her throat and let it off coupla times?”
“It wouldn’t be enough.”
I confess that the guys and I, who weren’t really hoodlums at all, talked theoretically on and off of assassinating Tonnie Ray. We had a prolonged deliberation over this idea throughout the rest of high school, but never could imagine anything quite excruciating enough for her. And we beheld with agony the fact that Tonnie Ray was making friends, she was getting in with the popular set; she became stylish and finally, to our horror, was one of the “Personalities of the Week” in the student newspaper.
“I say once a roach, always a roach,” one guy said.
“Damn right.” We were a bereaved consensus of three.
“Wouldn’t you like to pick up a pair of ice tongs and just …”
“Not good enough.”
We had the mill girls at Dream of Pines, too. These were the daughters of anybody who held a position below master foreman at one of the paper mills. Some of these gals were twenty-one and had given birth. These girls didn’t roach or advertise themselves. They even seemed to resent being spoken to by students above their class. Of course you noticed them right off; their clothes were not terribly sharp and they tended to be a bit bruised around the legs. They swarmed in at lunch from another building where vocational arts were taught. They’d look at you straightforwardly with either lust or disdain, and you could pick up on un-known swear words by just hanging back in a locker and listening to them crowd into the cafeteria line. We liked them. We looked studiously at their bosoms and hips and had nothing to say when they disappeared.