Susie Roberts, Rick’s youngest
sister, Rick Roberts the legendary Clintondale High School football and almost as
legendary “lady’s man,” was stuck. No, not stuck in some car stuck place on
some desolate road looking for Sir Galahad to show up and rescue the fair
damsel, pulling might and main to win her favors after she had stalled out forgetting
to put the clutch of her father’s Dodge in at the appropriate time, a task that
she had not quite mastered yet. Or car stuck down in some Adamsville Beach parking
lot late at night in some other father’s car, maybe a borrowed Buick, holding off some eager, too eager,
non-Galahad looking for more than to win her favors. And decidedly not stuck on
some Clintondale High Math Class Pythagorean Theorem problem looking for the
square root of some distance from point A to point B. She had Lenny Linsky for
that, and for any other mathsciencehistoryenglish problem that she needed
resolved. Yes, Lenny was that way about her. Had been since about seventh grade
when they had worked on a science project together and she nearly blew the chemistry
lab where they were working up and he decided then and there that she needed
some protection, and some study help as little good as it did him except a seventh
grade midnight kiss.
And she had a few others on her
string as well, a few hopeless others, not hopelessly willing however to join
Lenny in the slave- quarters. Everyone, hopeless or hopeful, agreed that while
Susie was not up to speed in the mechanical or smarts departments she was cute
(no knock-down drag-out beautiful but pretty enough, pretty enough not to have
to worry about mechanics or math now, and probably ever), tall, blonde, real
blonde if you can believe that in this day, this 1966 day in age, pert, and Miss
Personality. And in the final analysis isn’t that what you wanted in a high
school honey?
That though was exactly where
Susie’s stuck problem came in. See she was stuck on a soda jerk over at Doc’s
Drugstore in North Adamsville. And not just any of Doc’s five jerks (yes, I know
soda jerks, but let’s just shorthand this thing as jerks, no slander intended,
okay) but Jeff Brigham. Yes, Jeff Brigham the big time politico, student body
version, who had his picture taken with Robert Kennedy at some Northeast
anti-war student conference where they were mapping out ways to end the war in
Vietnam. And that was really where the problem came in. Jeff, bright, agile,
good-looking Jeff, those days has no time for Susie, well, Susie no brains,
although not really no brains but more no political brains. And why Susie had continually
asked herself should a sophomore, a good-looking sophomore girl in the year of
our lord, 1966, have to care about war, a war in some place she could not
locate on a map and couldn’t pronoun, about black civil rights in the far-off
south (and which Mr. Roberts had decidedly retro positions on which he freely
imparted over the dinner table about uppity n----rs), about whether Red China or
some China, she never got that clear, should be in the United Nations or not,
or about which way America should be going in the world just to keep up to
speed with a jerk. Even Doc’s top jerk with that heavenly smile that he once
sent her way. Once before he got the bug, before he wanted to tilt windmills for
the world and not for her.
Something was out of whack and Susie couldn’t figure out an
angle to get to Jeff. Hey, any other time, say a couple of years before in 1964
when he could hardly keep his eyes off of her, Jeff would be so much putty in
her hands. Would have been jerk proud, like the others at Doc’s, just to have
Susie come in and talk to him. But, damn, Susie muttered under her breath they weren’t
Jeff. And as many signals as she had given Jeff when she played Doc’s juke box,
played it to perdition, and tried to interest him in talking about songs like
The Temptations’ crooning My Girl; Otis Redding’s be-bopping I’ve
Been Loving You Too Long; Barbara Lewis practically begging her man to take
what he wants on Baby, I’m Yours; and when she turned the volume up for
Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman he just smiled his non-committal
smile and started talking about whether Robert Kennedy should, or should not,
run for President in 1968, or some such thing. And then Susie fumed under her
breath, the times were damn well out of joint.
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