Fifty Years Ago Today

       June 5, 1964: the last day of finals for the spring semester at Montclair State.   It's around ten o'clock that morning and I'm walking to my car, figuring I can get to work early and make some overtime that week.  That's when I was interrupted with a "Hey, stupid, where ya going?" from behind me.  Looking back, I see Dave heading for the same student parking lot.  He jogs up and asks the same question again.
        "Goin' to work, where else?"
        "Screw that!  Let's celebrate.  Get some beer and go swimmin'!" he counters.  I ask him where, since it's only June fifth and most of the lakes would be closed during the week, since public schools would be in session until the third week in June at least.
        He mentions a lake up Route 23 in Butler.  I tell him I don't have a suit or a towel and I want to make some overtime.
       "We can stop at my house an' I'll get you a towel.  You can wear one of Bob's (his younger brother by a couple years) suits.  Pick up a six-pack of Chug-a-Mugs.  We've gotta celebrate!"
       Well, the temptation was too great and anyway, it was a beautiful day, I was sure I had aced the English exam I'd just taken, and between five extra hours at E.J. Korvette's in West Orange or three cold Rheingolds, well, I followed him to his house where I left my car and off we went to the lake called McDonald's...which we found closed with a wire cable across the entrance.  Two more lakes farther up Route 23 were also closed.
       "This sucks!" I said, "take me back to your place so I can get to work."
       "Wait a minute, there's one more lake up ahead.  If that's closed, I'll take you back."
       A mile or two north was Sun Tan Lake...and the entrance was open. We drove in and looked around but all that was there was a Jeep on the highway side of the lake and next to it, some guy raking the sand.
       "It's not open, either," I said. "Just that guy doin' some maintenance an' he probably has the entrance open to go in and out."
      Dave reluctantly nodded and drove in far enough to make a U-turn.  That's when we saw a group of people on the opposite shore waving to us.
      "Wait!  It's open!" he shouted.
      "Naah, those are probably the kids of the owners who live in that white house up over there (on the hill above the lake)," I argued.
       Dave ignored me and drove his 1958 Ford over to that side.  Three girls in bathing suits came running up to the car: a chuibby brunette, a cute little blond, and another brunette on the thin side.  On a blanket sat a guy and behind him, something large and round, wrapped in towels, that reminded me of a statue of Buddha.
      "Hey, is this lake open?" Dave asked.
     "Yeah,"  the larger brunette said in an overly loud voice. "That guy over there (pointing to the one raking the sand next to the Jeep) will come over and get your money.  It's three bucks.  You can change in that building over there," she added, pointing to a cinderblock building a few yards away.
      Dave looked at me; I just shrugged.  So we drove over and parked next to the building, went in and changed into swim trunks.
      "I want the blond," he informed me. 
     "Fine.  Margot's coming home from Boston late tonight an' I've got no interest in some other babe," I told him.  Margot was my girlfriend from high school and was returning from her first full year at a two-year business school in Beantown, where her old man had sent her in hopes of our two-year romance dying because of the long-distance situation.  The last time I'd seen her was at Christmas, although we wrote each other almost daily.  Anyway....
       Going back outside and joining them on their blankets, we found out right away that the girls were all skipping school on Senior Skip Day at Clifton Senior High School.  We swam a little, played that "chicken game" where the girls sat on the guys' shoulders and tried to pull each other off; much to Dave's displeasure, the little blond chose to jump on me.  We went back to the beach blankets and talked, although I don't remember anything we talked about.  I think the girls were impressed that the two of us were "older" and "college boys," although it had never impressed me.  The problem was that after three hours of finishing our Rheingold and sharing their sandwiches, the little blond had plopped herself down next to me on the beach blanket each time,  much to the increased irritation of Dave, who had been stuck with the loud brunette.  I found out that the little blond was named Toni (the others were a girl named Danny -- for Danielle -- she was the loud, chubby one...and Jane, who was the girlfriend of the guy whose name was Charlie; he was home on leave from the Air Force).  The large person in the towels turned out to be the younger sister of Toni and she was wrapped up like that because she got sunburned easily and painfully.
        Sometime around noon, Toni had asked me if I wanted to take a walk so we followed some kind of nature trail around the small lake.  What I had begun to marvel at was that I could talk to her very easily, without feeling as if I had to act "cool" or make up some bullshit to impress her, the way I'd usually felt when I first met a girl.  After all, Margot was only my second girlfriend, the first having been stolen from me by divorce and the state of Maryland (you can read about it in my novel, FOR GLORIA, WHEREVER YOU ARE).  And much to my dismay and surprise, by the time we were making our way back to the rest of the gang, I found her hand had found its way into mine.  Talk about feeling guilty!
         Around two, I told Dave I needed to get back to my car so I could get to work by three, so we said our goodbyes and went into the building to get back into our clothes.  He bitched at me the whole time about being stuck listening to Danny "babble on and on about nothing." 
        "Whaddaya want me to do?!  Toni just kept sittin' down next to me!" I grumbled as I rolled up Bob's swim trunks in the borrowed towel.  "I told ya that Margot's coming home tonight.  Goin' swimming was your idea, remember?!"
       "Yeah, well, you got a girlfriend, I don't at the moment!  That Toni has a really nice ass and Danny's got no tits at all, if you didn't notice!" he snapped.  I had noticed that Danny, for all her chubbiness, was really lacking in the chest area.  I hadn't noticed Toni's rear, however.
       "Fine, let's go, okay?!" I growled, having a lot of other thoughts racing through my mind all of a sudden.
       The two girls were standing next to Dave's car when we exited the building.  We said our goodbyes and thanked them again for sharing their ham-and-tomato sandwiches with us.  He started the car and we headed out the gravel drive toward the highway.  We were halfway there when I suddenly shouted "Stop!"
       "Huh?!" he said.
       "Stop the fucking car!" I shouted again.  He slammed on the brakes and then looked at me.
      "You forget something back there?!" Dave asked with a frown.
      "Yeah!" I said.  Digging in his glove compartment, I found a matchbook and a ballpoint and jumped out of the car.  I ran back to where Toni and Danny were still standing, now with frowns on their faces.
      Walking up to Toni, and cleared my throat, I think, because I seem to recall that it was suddenly dry.
      "Uhh, do you think I could have your phone number...umm...to call you sometime?" I stammered.
      She just smiled and told me what it was.  I wrote it down on the inside of the matchbook.  I guess I said "thanks" and trotted back to the car.
      "What the hell was that all about?!" Dave asked as I closed my door and put his pen back in the glove compartment.
      "Asked her for her number," I explained rather lamely.
      "You what?! I thought your fucking girlfriend is comin' home tonight an' you're not interested in anyone else!" he yelled as he put the car in gear and spun gravel until we hit the asphalt of Route 23.
       Between the confusion in my mind and the guilty feelings I was experiencing, it took me five days to call her to ask if I could take her out.  It took another month of secretly seeing her before I broke it off with Margot.  And the rest is history.
       If I hadn't gone swimming that day, our paths would never have crossed.  I lived in Livingston, she lived in Clifton, miles apart with only my college in between. 

        And the rest is history...a long, fifty-year history that'll have to wait for the next stories.  But every time I taught Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in my high-school English classes, I always told this story.

CHILDHOOD etc.

 When childhood still held a certain amount of innocence....

When I was about eight or nine, at the dinner table one night, I asked my parents what a lesbian was, having encountered the word in my reading.  There was a stunned silence except for my two older brothers and sister, who either had milk spurting from their noses or were choking on their food.  The bulging eyes and the silence of my parents was odd because my father considered himself the font of knowledge.  Realizing that something was extraordinarily wrong, after dinner I consulted the dictionary.  The next night, to save myself further embarrassment, I told them all, with a happy smile, that I had discovered that a lesbian was an inhabitant of the island of Lesbos, and this resulted in the same milk episode and stunned stares, but I felt vindicated…although I didn’t know what vindicated meant, either. 

I was a young child…or a not-quite-old boy…when I saw these large letters on the sides of milk cartons in our family fridge: HOMO (which, of course, stood for HOMOgenized)…but having recently heard more-informed friends (who were blessed with OLDER brothers who could explain things that parents wouldn’t) …and seeing those letters and having heard those same classmates calling other guys “Homo!  Homo!” made me not want to drink any more milk…