Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (3 page)

Once during their six-month courtship they were necking like teenagers in his red Mustang when she abruptly pulled away. She yanked her hand from the side of his rump and stared at him: “Did you just fart on my hand?”

He had, but he was going to let it go, so to speak. That’s when he learned that Mama Jean never let anything go.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“I can’t
believe
you would fart on your date’s hand.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have had your hand down there.”

At that they broke up laughing. They always quipped that it was then that they knew it was true love.

On those early dates they both had a window into the future of what life would be like together. Dad remembers her getting out of the car and bumping into the headlight as she rounded the corner. She reprimanded the car with a “God …
damn
it!” and slapped the hood with her hand. “I’d never seen anyone get mad at an inanimate object before,” Dad would recall. After a night of drinks and dancing, and more drinks, Mama Jean found herself in the driver’s seat with an overserved Dad feeling no pain in the backseat. “I should have known then,” Mama Jean always said.

At thirty-four, Dad was ready for a family. At thirty-one, Mama Jean had a family, and a new, little house bought and paid for with government money. A white, aluminum-sided, one-story “ranchburger” built in the fifties, this rectangular shoe box was topped by a pitched roof and fronted by a three-columned porch, door in the middle, two sets of windows on either side—a one-story mini–White House. It had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, living/dining room in front, open kitchen/den in back, attached one-car garage. The only thing missing in her new house was a father. Jeffrey had already asked her if she could get a daddy for Ronny and him at the 7-Eleven.

By 1965, Mama Jean was back at the altar of St. Anne’s, but not in white. “You only get to wear white at the first wedding. After that it’s tacky.” As she wore that green dress, I was not even thought of, not even a twinkle in her eye.
How can there be a time in her life when I wasn’t thought of?

After that day it took three years for me to arrive. Their first stab at growing the family ended in miscarriage. When I finally made it out of the womb, in 1968, the stakes were high. I was placed in a crib positioned before one of the front windows of the mini–White House, as if on display. My brother Jeffrey said years later with good humor and a twinge of resentment, “It was like the second coming of Christ.”

Mama Jean and Dad were hoping for a redheaded, brown-eyed baby girl. “Oh, I wanted a little girl so bad. So I could dress her up like a little doll,” Mama Jean said. They were going to name me Julie. “Well, we came close, but there was something hanging between the legs,” Mama Jean joked. Tally Whacker Baby was her first nickname for me.

Dad and Mama Jean danced throughout their marriage. I loved to watch them dance, because even if it was just the two of them and me watching, it felt like a party. They danced whenever their song, “More,” came on the radio. A song meant to be danced to, meant to fall in love to, it had lyrics about the greatest love the world has ever known and being in a beloved’s life every “waking, sleeping, laughing, weeping” moment. For them, those lyrics might have been a bit heavy-handed, but Andy Williams, Bobby Darin, Doris Day, and Frank Sinatra sang that song to them wherever they went while they were dating.
Why don’t couples have their own song anymore?

They fought just as well as they danced, maybe even better, and they did plenty of that in front of me too. I always wished that they would dance as much as they fought, so we could keep the party going.

One of my earliest memories seems more like outtakes from a dream, the before and after pieces having dissolved after waking. There is no sound, only images that flicker like a home movie on Super 8 millimeter film. I am standing in my crib before the double-sash window and staring at a frantic Mama Jean, who is on the other side, outside in the dark in her nightgown and robe. Ronny and Jeffrey stand by her side, wide-eyed, their fingers in their mouths. She is scaring me, the way she yells and impatiently stabs her index finger at the middle of the window. I can’t figure out what she wants me to do. When I can’t figure it out, she shakes her head
no, no, NO!
I want to cry, but I don’t want to make her any more upset than she already is.
Why is she mad at me?
Somehow I figure out that she wants me to unlock the window, and my little toothpick fingers release the cold metal locks. Mama Jean throws open the window and pulls me out of the crib and into her arms. She runs with me to her blue Chrysler—or was it her new, white Mercury Marquis? The next thing I know, I am looking out the car window as she speeds out of the driveway. The front door of the house is open; the light inside casts a dim glow in the middle of the dark house like a night-light. Dad comes running barefoot across the lawn, yelling and pointing as if he is trying to catch us. The memory ends there.

*   *   *

If their song was “More,” mine was “Is That All There Is?” I must have been around five when I saw Peggy Lee on some variety show singing that haunting, fatalistic song. She was wearing about two hundred yards of white, diaphanous chiffon. Her platinum-blond hair was upswept into a cascade of sausage curls, and she had a black dot on her right cheek.

“What’s that?” I asked Dad.

He stopped drying the dish in his hand and stood in the middle of the room next to me. “That’s a beauty mark. My God! Jean, come quick! You’ve gotta look at Peggy Lee. She’s fat as a pig!”

A beauty mark?
Just like that dot on Miss Kitty’s face from
Gunsmoke,
a show I had zero interest in, save for Miss Kitty.
If only they would tell me when her scenes were on, I’d watch.
She was the only character from that show I remember besides Little Joe. Or was that
Bonanza
? Anyway, when Dad said to look at Peggy Lee, I looked. How could I not? She was mesmerizing, and “Is That All There Is?” hooked me from the first verse. Even though it is a very grown-up song, it wasn’t
that
odd that it spoke to my five-year-old mind. It was a story song, after all. To the tuba vamp of a gentle oompah band, she told me that when she was a little girl, her father gathered her up in his arms and they watched their house burn as the whole world went up in flames. Her little-girl, pragmatic answer to the situation? With a shrug she asked:

“Is that all there is to a fire?… If that’s all there is … let’s break out the booze and have a ball.”

Wow. That’s my kind of little girl. I couldn’t wait for the day that I could break out the booze and have a ball.

Around that time I took my first drink. It’s a memory I didn’t remember until after I stopped drinking. It wasn’t a full drink, but a sip of one. It was Dad’s. The memory is a Polaroid snapshot the color of autumn—orange, brown, and yellow—framed in knotty-pine paneling with my copper-red hair lighting the center. Dad was sitting on a sofa laughing; a Kent 100’s cigarette dangled from under his mustache, which matched my hair, but curiously not his own. Mama Jean loathed that mustache almost as much as she hated his drinking. His drink was on the corner of the coffee table. The tumbler was swimming-pool blue, globular, with circular crater depressions throughout, like a glass moon. I liked those depressions because they made the glass fun to hold. Inside was amber liquid with frothy bubbles swimming among the “rocks” on top. That’s what they called ice when it was cooling the brown stuff.
On the rocks
. I liked that phrase.

I don’t know if Dad offered me a drink, or if I asked for a sip. Maybe I just took it. I know that I stood at the corner of the coffee table with my little hands pressed into the craters of that magic highball and took a sip of a drink that I knew was only for adults. I hesitated and let it stay in my mouth a few seconds longer than any other liquid I’d ever drunk. I winced and swallowed. It was as if I’d stepped inside from the oppressive heat of a Beaumont summer to the arctic blast of central AC: startling, mind-altering, and so refreshing. I don’t remember any warm or fuzzy feeling or a feeling of
ahhh
. But I do remember the taste. It tasted like being an adult.

TWO

Press On

“Earl! Come quick! I think Jamie has a hard-on!” Dad came, as he always did when Mama Jean called, and stood next to her as she peered at me in my crib. He stared for a few seconds and a smile crept over his face.

He turned to her. “I believe he does. And it looks like he knows what to do with it.”

She faced him with a mixed look of horror and fascination, and then they both cracked up. Maybe that’s when I earned the nickname Tally Whacker Baby. I was two.

I have no recollection of this moment, but Mama Jean and Dad loved to repeatedly tell this as one of my early-childhood milestones. It’s a shame that my baby keepsake book didn’t have a place to record
Baby’s first erection
.

I
did
know what to do with that thing, and I was fearless about using it. “Pressing,” Mama Jean and Dad called it, because I did it lying on my stomach, my hands pressed into my gonads. I didn’t realize it was something that simply wasn’t done in public, like on the den floor in front of the TV, alongside the rest of the family. “Jamie, stop pressing” was a constant refrain. They never told me it was naughty or “self-pollution”—the official definition of
masturbation
from Mama Jean’s 1952 edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary—but to keep it to myself, so to speak. I sometimes forgot.

Once when I was pressing, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was facing Mama Jean’s Christmas-red toenails. They were spying from the trenches of the white shag carpeting of her bedroom.
Busted
. I looked up at her face, the window on top of the lookout tower of her body. “But it feels good” was my weak—and
completely
true—excuse.

As fearless as my pressing was, water was a different story.

From before I can remember, the mere suggestion of aquatic submergence was enough to make me “scream bloody murder,” as Mama Jean would say. Dad could merely hold my toddler body between his outstretched hands over a motel swimming pool and I’d scream, “No! No!
NO!
” as I balled up like a doodlebug.

The brown surf of the Gulf of Mexico beaches nearby terrified me even more. I was convinced that if I went near that mass of spilled dark beer with its head of white foam, I’d be sucked in, never to be seen again. The shore was littered with stinging jellyfish that looked like inflated sandwich baggies—the shore was littered with those too—so who knew what lay beneath that dirty brown water? Whenever we drove to Houston, eighty miles away, and crossed the Old and Lost Rivers on that barren stretch of I-10, I’d stare at the vast body of water and spook myself into imagining I was bobbing in the middle of it in a black night, trying to reach shore. I had recurring drowning nightmares where I was either running from water or robotically walking toward it. Either way, it eventually grabbed me and swallowed me whole. The water was always dark, never transparent.

Even the bathtub faucet was a source of
terror agua
when Mama Jean washed my hair. In my early youth, she and I were on the same hair-washing plan: once a week and washed by someone else, hers by the black ladies at Town & Country Beauty Salon, mine by her. Mama Jean had to hold a bone-dry, royal-blue washrag—folded to precisely the right width—over my tightly shut eyes so that no water could seep in. She’d plunge my head under the faucet for the shortest amount of time. Every plunge was a tiny bit of hell.

By three or four, I was able to get into a pool, but I’d only go as far as the steps. The built-in mesh underwear of my hula-boy swimsuit fascinated me to no end, but I was still miserable. I’d mask my misery—and utter boredom—with a fa
ç
ade of casual disinterest. I’d lounge with my elbows resting on the pool’s edge and gently pump my legs in the water as if to say,
I’m fine right here, but you kids go on and have fun.
My lounge act was always shattered when the other kids got too close. “Don’t splash me! Don’t splash me!” I’d get out with the bogus excuse of having to pee.
I could have used a cocktail in those moments—something stronger than a Shirley Temple, please.

My fear of water was temporarily replaced by a fear of something else: Mrs. Hammond. She taught me to swim when I was in kindergarten. She looked just like the Wicked Witch of the West’s Kansas version, Miss Gulch. Actually, in her yellow, one-piece bathing suit and white bathing cap, she looked like a bald Miss Gulch. She taught swimming in her long, rectangular pool behind her old, white-stucco, two-story house in the old part of Beaumont. The streets there were lined with brick, stucco, and clapboard houses like the ones on
Leave It to Beaver
or
Father Knows Best,
as opposed to
The Brady Bunch
–like houses in our neighborhood. You entered through a side gate, bypassing the house, which was too bad, because I wanted to see inside.

As Mama Jean and I approached the gate, the other kids skittered past, hopping with glee, as if they were headed to a birthday party instead of certain death. Except for one girl. Her right arm was stretched to the limit as she no longer held, but pulled, her mother’s hand. She squatted in resistance like a puppy on a leash for the first time. She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit with gold, orange, and red oversize daisies.
Cute suit.
I knew exactly how she felt. I knew such behavior would never fly with Mama Jean, so I continued the march of death with a brave face.

“Mary Alice, quit being such a pill and come on!” her mother said. She jerked her up and in the direction of the pool as she tossed her cigarette in the gutter.

I filed away the phrase
quit being such a pill
for future overuse.