need to work on in case we ever decide to kiss for real.”
One particular evening it took a young Phi Mu and me nearly 450 practice kisses before we finally got it right.
It was a friend of mine, Ronnie Jenkins, who taught me my first real lesson about women, which was, you never can tell about women.
We were between our junior and senior years in high school and we thumbed to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, because we heard there were, in fact, fine young women there and you could buy beer legally at eighteen, which meant if you were sixteen, like us, you could even order it in a loud voice.
The best accommodations we could afford upon our eventual arrival at Myrtle Beach was the utility room behind The Waves Motel. We paid a woman who had no teeth two dollars a night for the privilege of sleeping amongst the discarded lounge chairs and deflated beach balls. There was no air conditioning, of course, but one side of the room was chicken wire, which allowed a soft, ocean breeze to creep in, not to mention the gnats and mosquitoes.
Our first night there, we were into modest involvement with two young women when a strange thing happened. A man, obviously very drunk, came out of nowhere and began climbing on the chicken wire that was one side of the utility room.
“Eileen!” screamed the man. “Are you in there, Eileen?”
We asked the two girls and neither was named Eileen, which was some relief to both of us.
“I’m looking for Eileen,” insisted the man, now fully suspended on the chicken wire.
“I’ll lean over and you can kiss my . . .” Ronnie began before I stopped him.
“Careful. Maybe he’s got a gun,” I said.
“I don’t care if he’s got a bazooka,” said Ronnie. “Look what I’ve got.”
From somewhere in the rubble of the utility room and in the dark of the interrupted moment of passion, Ronnie had found a large oar. He drew back with the oar and hit the chicken wire with great force. The man flew off the chicken wire and into the yard where he began to roll.
“Wilmington,” Ronnie said the next day. “Wilmington, North Carolina.”
“What’s Wilmington, North Carolina?” I asked.
“Where that sucker on that chicken wire stopped rolling after I hit him with the oar,” Ronnie laughed.
The two girls. They are what this story was to be about in the first place. We’d met these two girls on the beach, and what can you tell about girls? They asked us how old we were and since we were sixteen, we said we were nineteen. I was a sophomore at the University of Georgia, Ronnie was home on leave from the Marine Corps.
They said they were fifteen.
When we left Myrtle Beach, they gave us their address and phone number and told us if we were ever in Star, South Carolina, be sure to look them up.
Soon, Ronnie got the itch for another trip.
“Let’s go see those two girls we met at Myrtle Beach,” he said.
We raised thirty-two dollars between us, which was enough for a pint of Stillbrooks bourbon at the local Moose Club, if you knew the bartender, two one-way tickets on the Southern’s Piedmont from Atlanta to Greenville, thirty miles southeast of Star, and three dollars left.
We ran through the Stillbrooks and spend $2.75 on Coke to mix it with in the club car of the train. When we arrived in Greenville, all we had was a quarter.
We started walking.
“Our troubles are over,” said Ronnie all of a sudden.
“Our parents are here to take us home?” I asked, wishing out loud.
“No, stupid,” said Ronnie. “I see a pool hall. Watch me work.”
He was good at pool, Ronnie. Moved quickly around a table with confidence and finesse. Shot with one eye closed and the other watering from the smoke from his cigarette.
He fished our last quarter from his pocket and got into a game in no time. Eight-ball. “Let the kid break,” said Ronnie’s opponent. I didn’t like the man instantly. He had several tattoos on his arms and the toes were cut out of both his shoes and his fingers were yellow from the miles of Camel smoke that had oozed between them.
Quarter a game to start. Ronnie was on a roll. He was up a dollar. Then, two dollars. Then, three. I’d never been inside a pool hall before. When the regulars began to whisper and the man with the tattoos began to perspire and light one Camel off the other, I didn’t know it was time to be concerned for our lives.
Ronnie understood the situation perfectly. After he’d sunk the eight-ball in the right corner on a beautiful two-bank, he pocketed the last of the five ones his stick had brought forth from the table. And, just before the victim of Ronnie’s immense talent was about to bring forth some blood from Ronnie’s head with his own stick, Ronnie calmly asked the man, “Sir, do you have a daughter?”
“I ain’t got no daughter,” said the man.
“Too bad,” said Ronnie, still calm. “If you did and she had your looks, I hoped we could shoot one more game to see who enters her in the hog show at the county fair next year.”
The man was too full of rage to move for the split second it took Ronnie to grab me and have us six blocks away from the pool hall and gaining on downtown Greenville.
“Make a man mad enough,” Ronnie said, “and it’s as good as landing the first punch. He’s too stunned to move.”
Genius. Ronnie Jenkins was genius.
We ate a couple of cheeseburgers and bought a six-pack with the money Ronnie had won, and then we called the two girls in Star and they said their parents would be out of town until two o’clock in the morning and they couldn’t wait to see us, and would we bring them each a Hershey bar? Ronnie’s wanted nuts. Mine, plain.
We bought the Hershey bars with the last of the money and hitched a ride to Star, which was a small place. We eventually wound up on the girls’ front porch about ten o’clock. Nothing was moving inside.
“Maybe this isn’t the place,” I said.
“It’s the place,” said Ronnie, “they’re just bashful.”
When banging on the door and shouting didn’t work, Ronnie started singing some Beach Boys’ songs we had all listened to earlier at Myrtle Beach. Lights flicked on around the neighborhood, and that’s how he finally flushed out the girls.
“We didn’t think y’all would really come,” said Ronnie’s girl from behind the screen door of the house.
“Even brought the Hershey bars,” said Ronnie. “You nuts or plain?”
“Nuts,” she said. “Nadine is plain.”
Now, the girls are eating the candy bars behind the screen door and we’re still on the porch.
“Can we come in now?” Ronnie asked.
