bar clinging to the side of her mouth. Neither one of them looked quite as pretty as they had at the beach, I was thinking to myself.
“Can’t come in?” Ronnie burst out, unbelieving.
“We ain’t old enough,” said the girl.
“You’re fifteen,” said Ronnie.
“Naw, we ain’t,” the girl insisted. “I’m thirteen, but Nadine ain’t but twelve. We lied to y’all at the beach. If daddy came home, he’d kill us and call the law on y’all.”
Ronnie tried to get what was left of the Hershey bar back, but the girl had bolted the screen door and had already eaten all the nuts anyway. I looked in one more time to see if I could get a last glance at Nadine, but all I could see was her back. She was feeding something to a cat. Probably the rest of her Hershey bar.
We were down after that. No girls. No money. We caught a ride with a brakeman on the Southern, who was heading back to Greenville, and he let us off at an all-night service station where Ronnie managed to get his arm up a vending machine and pull down two packs of toasted malted crackers for us to eat.
We sat there all night, waiting for the dawn when we’d hitch back home. Ronnie was quiet that night, deep in thought.
Just before daybreak, he turned to me and said, “I’ll bet that won’t be the last time either one of us gets made a fool of by a woman.”
Genius. The man was a genius. And a prophet, as well. I’m thirty-five now, and I’ve been married three times, already, which is even more of a feat when you consider I didn’t start until I was nineteen.
The first person I married was my childhood sweetheart. Lovely girl. Blonde. Sweet. I got fat eating her cooking. We lasted three years.
My first divorce, when I was twenty-two, was terrible. I was heartbroken over the entire matter, and for the first time in my life, I turned violent. Luckily, nobody was injured, however. My wife moved out and took an apartment. One night, I decided to go visit her and beg her to come home. Not only did I love her and miss her, but I didn’t know what to do about my underwear, which is a problem that befalls a lot of men when they divorce for the first time.
When I was a child and wanted a clean pair of underwear, I would go and look in my drawer, and there would always be clean underwear. Same when I was married for the first time. When my wife left me, my underwear no longer marched from where I dropped it, washed itself in the washing machine, and then marched back, folded itself, and returned to my drawer.
Nobody answered when I knocked on the door to my wife’s apartment. Suddenly, it occurred to me she was out with another man. I returned to my car in the parking lot and waited for them to come home. I would confront them both, I decided, and tell my wife of my love and she would come back to me and I would have clean underwear again.
I also decided she could be out with Dick the Bruiser, for all I knew, so I went to my truck and got my tire tool. I waited for several house. My wife and Dick the Bruiser never came home. I went to sleep with my tire tool in my lap. The next day, I found out my wife hadn’t been out with Dick the Bruiser, or anybody else. She had been home visiting her mother.
I felt like an idiot, having spend the night with a tire tool. I went to the laundromat and washed my underwear.
Three years later, I married again. We were in a terrible hurry to get it done. I called another friend of mine, Ludlow Porch, and asked if he would find a preacher as quickly as possible.
“Consider it done,” he said.
The preacher had a small, thin mustache and talked in a squeaky voice. He looked like a crooked Indian agent off Tales of Wells Fargo. He began the service by opening the Bible and squeaking out, “It says here . . .”
Three years later, when I divorced my second wife, Ludlow said, “I knew it probably wouldn’t work out anyway.”
“How did you know that?” I asked.
“Because I couldn’t find a real preacher for your wedding on that short of notice. The man that married you changes flats at the Texaco station near my house.”
I would have taken a tire tool to my friend Ludlow Porch, but he is built like Dick the Bruiser.
My second wife left me when we were living in Chicago. I had no alternative but to attempt to have dates with Northern women. Since I am a native Georgian, I had never been out with Northern women before. There are some distinct differences between Northern women and Southern women.
Southern women make better cooks than Northern women. Northern women make good cooks only if you like to eat things that still have their eyes, cooked in a big pot with asparagus, which would have been better off left as a house plant.
Southern women aren’t as mean as Northern women, either. Both bear watching closely, but a Southern woman will forgive you two or three times more than a Northern woman before she will pull a knife on you. Most important, Southern women know how to scrunch better. Scrunch is nothing dirty. It is where, on a cold night, you scrunch up together in order to get cozy and warm. And, Southern women can flat scrunch.
With this attitude, it is easy to see why I was usually very lonely in Chicago. One night, I found a bar in Chicago with a country music juke box. I had a few beers and watched a guy walk over to the juke box with a handful of quarters.
My second wife had split and I was far from home, adrift on a lonely sea.
“Play a love song,” I said to the guy at the juke box.
I needed it badly. One thing about country music. It has something to say.
They guy played a song entitled “She Tore Out My Heart and Stomped the Sucker Flat.”
I left the bar and went home and washed my underwear.
I was fifteen the first time I found out I had trouble with my heart that didn’t relate to falling in or out of love. A country doctor listened to it beat and was not pleased with what he heard.
“Hmmmmm,” said the doctor, moving his stethoscope to another position.
I didn’t know it at the time, but a patient can learn a great deal about his condition simply by listening to the sounds the doctor makes while he conducts his examination.
“Hmmmmm” means there is something very interesting going on inside you. A policeman makes the same sound when he pulls you over and there is an empty bottle of Gallo Thunderbird wine on the seat next to you.
“Ahhhhhh” means he just remembered the last time he heard something going on inside you. It was back in medical school the day he was assigned his first cadaver.
“Oooooh” means that, compared to you, the cadaver was in good health.
“What is the problem, doctor?” I asked.
“Heart murmur,” he answered.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’ll probably grow right out of it.”
I didn’t worry about it. I went right along with the normal life of the next demented child. I played sports throughout high school. I went off to college and
