RENDEZVOUS WITH ANGELO
…
“Nadine, you stay away from that pool hall, y’hear? It’s no place for a young lady. Nothing can be found in there but smoking and profanity and men with but one thing on their minds.” Mama was right, of course. It may be the 1960s, but society still views young ladies who patronize pool halls as exercising loose morals. In fact, Mama had me trained so well that I automatically crossed the street to avoid walking past Wally’s Pool Hall, where Satan himself obviously held sway.
“Your mama is so old fashioned,” chided my best friend, Loretta, whose own morals weren’t quite tight as they should have been.
Miffed by her keen observation, I asked, “Have you ever been inside Wally’s?”
“Almost. I knocked on the window once to tell Bubba Lee that Daddy was lookin’ for him.”
We were sitting in the window booth at the Soda Shoppe cooling off with root beer floats and listening to “Stagger Lee” on the Wurlitzer while watching Wally’s across the street. And that’s when we saw him. He walked out of the pool hall, leaned back against the building and pressed his right foot up against the wall behind him. He ran his left hand through his dark, wavy hair and then lit a Lucky Strike from a pack he kept rolled up in the sleeve of his t-shirt.
“Oh my Gawd!” Loretta gasped. “What an absolute dreamboat!” Then she sighed and said, “He looks to be Eye-talian. My daddy would sure take the switch to me good if he ever caught me with the likes of him. Y’know, leaning against Wally’s like that, he kinda looks like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Just like James Dean but with dark hair.”
My own hormones were on a collision course with my common sense. I had been looking for someone whose primed animal instincts were all wrapped up in a fine pair of faded Levi’s, someone with a sweet talkin’ smile, someone whom mothers feared and sweet young thangs dream about, at a time when the local high school boys suddenly seemed gawky and crude. So the moment I saw him I knew in that split heart-thudding second that he was the one.
“Where are you off to, Nadine?”
“Just out, Mama.”
“You be home before dark.”
“But it’s summertime, Mama. I’ve done all my chores, and I don’t have to get up for school.”
She looked me over good. I wore what I always did: shorts with a freshly pressed blouse and a pair of Keds. My face was scrubbed, my teeth were brushed, and my long brown hair was pulled back neatly into a pony tail. I must have passed muster because she cocked one eyebrow and said, “Well then, young lady, you be home by a decent hour.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
A decent hour was the equivalent of handing me a rope to see if I was going to hang myself. She left it up to me to judge when the decent hour ended, at which time I was to be off the streets and in the house. Woe be it to me should I miscalculate. Referring to me as a young lady was how she reminded me to behave in a propitious manner. Some people rule with an iron fist; Mama rules with iron expectations.
There are only two places in this small town where guys congregate in the evenings. Wally’s was their first stop. I lingered in front of the Soda Shoppe just long enough to determine that he was across the street playing pool with Loretta’s big brother, Bubba Lee Titus. It wasn’t long before he left Wally’s with Bubba Lee and walked to their other favorite spot, Maybelle’s honky-tonk, located in a section of town forbidden to me. According to Bubba Lee, Maybelle’s was known for nefarious activities and the best stocked jukebox in the entire county. On weekends, he said, the place pulsated with live bands. He described Maybelle as a bawdy woman of lusty proportions who ran her establishment with her strapping son, Cletus. I sat in the shadows across the street and enjoyed the music that poured out of the open door until the decent hour began closing in on me and I reluctantly decided I had better get home.
I spent my afternoons with Loretta at the swimming hole down by the sawmill. I worked on my tan while she worked on the boys. It was a game to her. She’d set her hips in motion and make the rounds, occasionally leaving boys bickering in her wake.
“Would you look at that. Lonnie Ketchum and Billy Joe Jeeter are fighting over me again.”
“I swear you positively delight in their suffering at times.”
“It’s not my fault! I can’t help it if boys like me.”
“Y’know, Loretta, maybe you should light on one boy instead of every pair of pants you encounter.”
“You mean concentrate on just one boy when all of them want me?”
“Mm mm mm. If Officer Titus could hear you now!”
“Oh, I can handle Daddy all right,” she scoffed.
“All I’m saying is that maybe you’re spreading yourself a bit thin.” Occasionally I take a harmless verbal swipe at her, yet she rarely seems to notice. Loretta is immune to sarcasm.
“I’m not like you, Nadine. I don’t always wait for boys to make the first move. Sometimes y’just gotta grab the bull by the horns.”
I spent my evenings tailing him from Wally’s to Maybelle’s. Sometimes he was with Bubba Lee and sometimes he was alone. He had a casual perfection about him. His lean body moved with the fluid, hypnotic grace of a jungle cat, which fueled my nightly aerobic dreams. I’d ask Loretta to ask Bubba Lee for his name, but I didn’t want to encourage her curiosity. For two weeks I followed him, never learning his name, until one night I took a chance and ventured across the street and into the alleyway next to Maybelle’s. I had crouched down to tie my sneakers when the door opened and he walked out.
“Here, let me help you up.”
He looked down at me and flashed a hundred-watt smile, extending his right hand to help me to my feet. In one swift and practiced maneuver, he wrapped his left arm around my waist, scooping my body up close to his, and danced me around the alley to Johnny Rivers singing “Mountain Of Love” coming from inside Maybelle’s.
“You’re a good dancer,” he said afterwards as he lit a cigarette.
“You are, too,” was all I could manage.
He leaned against the building and said, “I’m Angelo.”
I lived for our brief encounters in the alley. Sometimes we danced in the neon glow of Maybelle’s, swaying to songs like “Kansas City” and “Shotgun.” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” was my favorite, giving me a solid two minutes of cheek to cheek and hip to hip with him. Sometimes we’d sit in the doorway of the building across the alley and talk about nothing in particular while he’d casually drape his arm around my shoulders, his hand dangling so close to my breast that I wondered if I should chance inhaling or not. Some nights I got nothing more than a quick hello. Not once did he try to take advantage of me, much to my dismay. While I may have been nothing more than a fleeting amusement for him, I was utterly mesmerized by Angelo.
He rented a room on the third floor of a rooming house not far from my home. I learned this one night by following him after he had left Wally’s. Instead of heading for Maybelle’s, he took off in the opposite direction, ending up on my street two blocks from my home. From across the street I saw him walk in the front door of a large Victorian house, and a few moments later the light went on in the third floor window. Angelo stood at the open window long enough to smoke a cigarette, his bare chest glistening from the sultry evening. I stood there gazing up at his window until it began to gently rain, and then I headed for home.
I stood in the dimly lit hallway in front of his door clutching my raincoat about me. The house was hushed except for the barely audible strains of a raspy radio inside his room. I was summoning up the courage to knock on his door when I heard footsteps approaching from within his room. I panicked and started for the stairs until I heard someone coming up. Finding nowhere else to go, I hid deep within the shadows at the end of the hall. I needn’t have worried, however, about being discovered as it became painfully obvious that Angelo’s mind was preoccupied with someone else.
He opened his door and walked to the stairwell. My heart quickened at the sight of his bare chest, his solid shoulders and his perfectly arched bare feet Just like James Dean but with dark hair. He peered over the railing as the sound of footsteps could be heard softly creeping up the stairs. And then my heart sank as he smiled in a way that even I knew could only be meant for someone who was more than just a friend. He reached out his hand, as he had done for me that first night in the alley, and welcomed Bubba Lee Titus into his room and closed the door.
1 Comments:
Thanks, Partisan!
Post a Comment
<< Home