alt="wheel-fortune-filtered.png"/>She’d shout “Number Boy!,” “Card Girl!,” and so on; and if any Vanna White prototype missed a cue, she lost the job and joined the less-lucky classmates who had to answer the questions.
The only relief was to sneak into Frehse’s room, and steal the card with your name on it. Yes, I confess that I did it. I was also half of a two-man commando team that stole the door knocker from her house. Alan Disler was the other half.
Our exploit was too good a story to keep to ourselves, and we could not resist displaying our shiny trophy at school. Word traveled fast and we were quickly confronted by the indignant cat lady. We went back to her house and replaced the knocker. At least we weren’t arrested.
Getting a bad mark from Frehse was no reason to be upset, unless you wanted to satisfy your parents or get into college.
In a strange effort to make failures feel better, she claimed that “an F is the mark of true genius,” and often said, “I only flunk my brightest students.” Unfortunately, very few college admissions officers knew that Frehse’s F was the equivalent of another teacher’s A.
The girl who got double F’s for liking Pat Boone must have been a future Nobel Prize winner.
Frehse lost an exam of mine during the first marking period. Despite contrary attendance documentation, she accused me of playing hooky that day and failed me for several months’ work.
The next term I earned an apparently indisputable A average, but Frehse gave me a C.
The orange-haired cat lady said that she knew I deserved an A, but it was “too great a jump to go from an F to an A,” so I was stuck with the mediocre C.
This was during our vital junior year in high school, when our marks would affect college admissions and influence the course of the rest of our lives.
In my yearbook, the crazy cat lady wrote that I was “a wonderful person,” and maybe I should be pleased that I had an F on my report card to prove that I was one of her brightest students.
One even brighter Frehse failure skipped a couple of grades and went to Yale.
Chapter 5
Drugging Miss Daisy
It was a huge self-service store with a gigantic sign that proudly proclaimed “2 Pairs for $5.”
If you needed only one pair, you paid $2.99, but hardly anyone ever bought just one.
If someone did need just one, she’d hang around the store and partner with someone else who needed one, so they could share the five-buck deal.
Five bucks paid for style, but not much quality.
These shoes were made of plastic, cardboard, glue and staples. If you wanted footwear constructed with thread and the skin of a cow or a pig, you had to shell out the big bucks at PairAway, at least $5.99 per pair. Few of the expensive shoes were sold, except for prom shoes and the $8.99 steel-toe work shoes that were necessary to protect steelworkers’ lower extremities.
I was vastly overqualified for a self-service shoe joint because I had experience working in a real shoe store and actually knew how to measure feet and judge if shoes fit. But they needed an employee and I needed a job, so a deal was done.
The store manager was Davey, who had recently returned from a few years soldiering in Viet Nam. He was aware of my anti-war politics and agreed with them.
Second in command was Daisy, the wife of a Marine then in Viet Nam. Daisy was still in the “my country, right or wrong” state of mind, but never argued about the war with Davey or me, She just wanted her husband to come back, whole and healthy.
Miss Daisy drove a bright red fastback Chevy Impala with a USMC decal on the rear window and a noisy exhaust system. The car looked like it was 40 feet long. She drove it very fast and got a lot of tickets. The cops couldn’t miss a loud and long bright red Impala.
Daisy’s sister, Janie, worked at the nearby Just Born candy factory, and often brought Daisy bags of chocolate-and-molasses- coated Peanut Chews, which Daisy eagerly scarfed down, apparently to compensate for the absence of her husband and high school sweetheart, Gary.
Thanks to the Peanut Chews, and a daily Whopper-With-Cheese from the nearby Burger King, Daisy put on about 20 pounds in two months. Then she panicked when she learned that Gary would be coming home for some unanticipated “R&R” (rest and recreation).
Not wanting to scare him away, she determined to quickly shed the effects of the excess eating and regain the body she had on their honeymoon. She made an appointment with a “diet doctor,” who sent her home with a supply of Dexedrine brand amphetamine diet pills, known outside the doctor’s office as speed. “Dex” is a powerful psycho-stimulant that increases wakefulness, energy and confidence while decreasing fatigue and appetite.
Davey and I were amazed at the effect the Dexedrine had on Daisy. Not only were the pounds evaporating, but she was absolutely energized. She started coming to work earlier than she had to, and working later than she had to, and was actually waiting on our customers instead of just sitting behind the cash register. The combination of drugs and increased physical activity gave Daisy an amazing body sculpting, and she was HOT. Male customers ogled her and tried ineffective pickup lines. Daisy looked so good that Davey said he would have tried to take her to bed if she was not his employee and if her husband was not a massively muscled Marine who was coming home soon.
He did seem to give her many more hugs than before the transformation and he admitted to me that she had become the subject of his masturbatory fantasies. It was apparent that if she had given him the slightest encouragement, the ex-Army man would have made a move to temporarily replace Daisy’s Marine.
I, too, was attracted to the new Daisy, and I wasn’t her boss or afraid of her husband. However, I had a girlfriend at the time, and wasn’t interested in an affair with someone else’s wife.
Just as Daisy’s sister Janie had shared her supply of Peanut Chews, Daisy offered to share her speed. Davey readily agreed. I was not a good pill-taker, having only recently made the transition from rectal aspirin to oral, but I had tried LSD and marijuana, and this was the ’60s, so why not?
The next day, after sampling Daisy’s supply, Davey and I met with her doctor. This was a time when doctors could actually sell medication to their patients—not merely write prescriptions for pharmacists to sell to the sickly—and he did not demand much proof of the need for speed.
Soon there were three pill-popping amphetamine-addicted idiots working at PairAway.
We were excellent employees. We were hyper, hyped-up employees. The store looked GREAT. I made beautiful window displays. Davey made beautiful signs. Daisy kept the store clean. As soon as a speck of dirt appeared on the carpet, out came the vacuum cleaner. As soon as a fleck of dust or a fingerprint appeared on the front counter, out came the spray bottle of Windex glass cleaner.
When a pair of shoes was sold, leaving a gap on the shelves, we’d immediately start shifting the stock to fill in the space, so it looked perfect.
