NO
POINTS FOR STYLE
From the
chapter "The Gentlest Decade"
NO
POINTS FOR STYLE
The
young male society in
Americus
had an
informal moral rating code that was used to codify and
describe the different behavior paradigms of the young women
in town. The
ratings crossed socio-economic lines and described types of
behavior rather than social status or economic standing in
the community. The
ratings went something like this:
§
“Iceberg”
- Don’t even think about it.
Girls in this category tended to be stuck-up,
studious, and totally aloof.
A good friend of mine actually went out on a date
with one of them and I later asked him, “How did you make
out?”
“Well,”
he said, “I tried to put my arm around her in the picture
show but my arm froze solid and broke off from my body.
She felt sorry for me and offered to teach me how to
recite the Pythagorean Theorem in Latin, Greek, and ancient
Aramaic.” The
girl went on to become a famous bone doctor who invented a
painless procedure for knee replacements.
§
“Goody-two-shoes”
– The young males of that era were not the only gender to
kiss and tell. A
girl in this category didn’t mind slipping you a kiss or
two, but then, she would be so overcome with guilt and
angst, that she would tell her mama every detail of the
kissing incident. Her
mama would call your mama and raise sand because you had
dared to kiss her sweet, virginal, innocent daughter, and
ruin her forever. This
happened to me only once and I explained to both my parents
that the act of kissing usually involved the confluence of
two sets of lips, and her willing lips made up the second
set. Besides, if
the lass had not been willing then there definitely would
have been no confluing of lips.
“As for ruining her life,” I ventured,
“she’ll never get married anyway. What man would marry a
girl who, after their wedding night, will call her mother
and whine about what her husband just did to her?”
§
“Prissy”
- These girls were not stuck-up or unfriendly; they were
just, “prissy.” They
always had money and acted with a certain degree of
independence. They
were also somewhat unpredictable.
You could tell one of them, “Look, spring is here
and the azaleas and dogwoods are busting out all over the
place. Let’s
take a picnic basket out to such-and-such’s pasture, have
a picnic supper, and lie back on the blanket and count the
stars. No monkey
business, I promise.”
“That
sounds great,” she would reply, “but instead of a
blanket, bring a chaise lounge for me and a pair of
handcuffs for yourself, just in case you are lying about the
monkey business part.”
We didn’t go on our picnic but later I did talk her
into going quail hunting with me.
I had to give up and quit early because she screamed
and stamped her foot every time I shot a bird.
Why else would you go quail hunting?
She acted like I had killed somebody kin to her or
something. It’s just like I said earlier; prissy.
§
“Good
Ole Girls” - These girls represented dating and social
salvation for most of the young male population.
They were friendly, not stuck-up, weren’t prissy,
always asked what you were going to have before ordering
from a menu, probably had no secrets from their closest
friends, went uptown with hair curlers in their hair on
Saturday afternoons to advertise they had a date that night,
and were, as a rule, very good kissers.
It
took about four dates involving the spending of money before
they would not get their pedal pushers in a knot if you
parked under the pecan trees at the Varsity after the
picture show was over. Face
time was not a problem; however, they did have an invisible
line of behavior you had better not step across.
This was dangerous because each girl did not draw
that invisible line in exactly the same place.
One
of my very good friends learned this the hard way.
He was on his fifth date with one of the good ole
girls and pulled up under the big pecan tree at the Varsity
after a basketball game, with no apparent dissent.
“Evidently,”
he told me as he began his tale of woe and despair, “I
didn’t just step over the invisible line; I jumped over
it. When I made
what I thought was a very cool move, she hit me on the nose
with a right cross, reached over and opened my door, scooted
against her door, and kicked me out of my own car with both
of her feet. She
then drove herself home in my car.
When I went over to pick up my car the next morning
the keys were not in it, so I knocked on her front door.
Her mother came to the door and said my car keys were
in a storm sewer a half block down from their house, and
wasn’t I ashamed of what I had done?”
Brother, you’ve got to respect those out-of-bounds
stakes!
§
“Fast”
or “Loose” - It didn’t take four dates with these
girls to end up under the pecan trees.
The first date was usually sufficient.
You learned very quickly that the Varsity was not the
place to be with one of these girls, as you had more than a
fair chance for the gods of love to smile down on you.
That kind of behavior just wouldn’t do at the
Varsity, so you found other places to go and discuss the
significance of the Whiskey Rebellion, and how the erosion
of the free-market economic policies of the
United
States
caused
inflation. These
girls also had a line of behavior.
Their behavior lines tended to be a little more
flexible than the lines drawn by the good ole girls, but
there were definitely limits as to what was acceptable.
After
you had exhausted your discussions of history and economics,
and had driven your date home, you usually went back to the
Varsity to ride through one time and sneer at the losers
parked under the Varsity pecan trees.
You then parked, went inside and had a Varsity
“half-steak” while regaling anyone who would listen with
wildly exaggerated tales of your personal sexual and social
prowess. Of
course, while you were in the Varsity telling a bunch of
made-up stuff to guys who really didn’t want to hear it,
your date was on the phone entertaining her closest girl
friends with her own made-up tales of your childish and
bumbling attempts to prove your machismo.
§
“Low-Rent”
– Low-rent girls smoked and actually inhaled, had
questionable reputations, didn’t bother trying out for
cheerleading, generally hung around with older guys of
questionable reputation, and in a perverse twist of social
logic, usually made pretty good grades.
They didn’t hang out with many students from the
mainstream. They
generally were attracted to the “JD’s” or hoods, and
today would probably be the girls with the punk hairdos,
heavy black eyeliner, with bodies resembling dolls made from
Tinker Toys dressed in ugly clothes.
We avoided these girls, mainly out of fear that they
would expose us as the know-nothing sexual neophytes we
really were. On
another perverse note, they usually had outstanding, perfect
bodies. No dolls
made from Tinker Toys in our lot of low-rents.
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