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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