Contacts, Pain and Pleasure

It was Griffiss Air Force Base, Rome, New York, 1962. I remember the gate to the base, the fence around the sergeant’s section and the fence around the officer’s section. The base hospital was a few blocks away and the pavilion was up on a hill behind it. They sold Kent cigarettes in the cigarette machine in the lobby of the hospital. They cost thirty-five cents and I bought a pack, took ’em up to the pavilion to try ’em out.

The pavilion was dark and damp. No one else was inside. It was a wet, rainy weekday after school and Lorraine and I walked up there. Lorraine smoked all the time. I hadn’t tried anything and I was goin’ on seventeen.

That summer between my sophomore and junior year when we moved up there from Topeka I decided to change my whole style. First thing I did was take my glasses off. I couldn’t see without ’em but I felt I looked a whole lot better. Kathy Oliver was gettin’ contacts. That was the latest. They had just come out with ’em and I wanted ’em, too, but they cost eighty dollars and that was with our base discount. They’d be twice that off base so if I was gonna do it I’d have to before I graduated from high school or I wouldn’t qualify for the discount anymore.

Figurin’ out how to get the eighty dollars was a whole ’nother matter and if I wanted ’em it was me that would have to come up with it. That’d be a lotta babysittin’ so I started figurin’ ways to talk myself out of wantin’ ’em. For one thing I’d heard about the gettin’ used to ’em part and I didn’t too much like the idea of goin’ through all that.

So I started sayin’ to myself the beauty would be more than I could handle. There’re benefits in lookin’ good, but there comes a point where you can look too good. I hadn’t reached that point, yet, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Look at Francie Widston. In sixth grade she was my best friend and had a long blond ponytail and someone wrote “I like to f-u-c-k Francie” up on the water tower on Burnett’s Mound where everyone went parkin’. I know it wasn’t true ’cause Francie was my best friend and if it were true she woulda told me so. They musta just wrote that ’cause of her blond ponytail. So anyway, I figured it’d be best if I didn’t get contacts. Kathy Oliver got hers, though. There were a bunch of kids in her family, like mine. She worked in a beauty shop, sweepin’ up hair and saved up. She ended up gettin’ murdered by some guy hidin’ out in some big restaurant bathroom in Florida the summer after we graduated. I decided then and there when I read the murder story in True Detective magazine and looked at her senior picture with no glasses starin’ out at me, blown up to fill the full page, that I was never gettin’ contacts.

The second thing I did movin’ to a new base was I decided to not be shy anymore. I didn’t know if you could just up and do somethin’ like that, just decide not be shy. I always figured shy was somethin’ you were born with but I figured I’d give it a try.

I borrowed a white, low-cut, sleeveless, cinched waist, circular skirt dress from Lorraine. I had a suntan from bein’ a water safety assistant at the pool all summer and that white dress next to my dark tan and no glasses, well, when I looked in the mirror I couldn’t believe it was me.

We were going to a CAP dance, Civil Air Patrol. It was an outside dance and since I had this new attitude about not being shy it musta worked ’cause these cadets and airmen were askin’ me to dance. It mighta had somethin’ to do with the fact that guys outnumbered girls ten to one but I didn’t think about that at the time. I just said yes and danced.

The cadets weren’t bad, the airmen were too old, and the base kids who happened to show up were the best. Dominick Spinelli asked me to dance three times. He was a big football player at the school I’d be going to. He walked me home and I let him kiss me good night. That was the second kiss I’d ever had. The first kiss was by Danny Sullivan back in Topeka. He was out of high school already and told Francie I didn’t even know how to kiss.

Well I figured I’d done better with Dominick ’cause my period was due and not comin’. I was certain that sperm crawled out of him, down my borrowed dress and got up inside somehow. It had to, why else would my period not come. Thank God it finally did, six weeks later. I still didn’t go out with Dominick anymore. I just stared at his butt at football games.

Lorraine lit my Kent cigarette in the pavilion and handed it to me. I sucked in hard like she said but it musta been too hard ’cause I coughed forever. This is not fun, I said. Why do you do it? I asked her. It gets easier, she said, but I decided, then and there I wasn’t going through pain for pleasure.

. . . and I think of Kathy everytime I go into a public bathroom.